Rich Skrenta, DMOZ-founder and all round good guy, gives us a look into what is happening behind DMOZ at the moment.

“Apparently the machine holding dmoz in AOL ops crashed. Standard backups had been discontinued for some reason; during unsuccessful attempts to restore some of the lost data, ops blew away the rest of the existing data on the system“

Sounds like a comedy act.

DMOZ was good once, and it gave us the seed of the idea that we could collaborate, Web 2.0 stylee, and build something that the corporations couldn’t. But it didn’t scale. They barricaded the walls. DMOZ just lost the plot.

I very much doubt the same people who run DMOZ now will be able to create and run a new directory that will make big waves. Doing so would mean competing with Wikipedia, and Google, and the thousands of other directories. Then again, perhaps someone, somewhere in the system has some vision.

They’re probably buried alongside pending submission #48851942….

When Yahoo ruled the roost, the problem was this: it took forever to get a listing in Yahoo. Some bright spark, by the name of Rich Skrenta, addressed that problem. He created a directory run by webmasters, for webmasters, and anyone else who thought the listings might be valuable.

Nice idea.

As the years went by, after Rich had long gone on to bigger and better things, DMOZ, like a sad demented uncle, gradually lost the plot entirely. It is now quicker to get out of the Google sandbox than it is for many webmasters to get a listing for their site in DMOZ. Worst of all, DMOZ alienated the very people who DMOZ was built to serve: webmasters seeking timely directory listings.

There are various reports surfacing on the web that DMOZ has been experiencing unspecified hardware problems for more than a week, with editors unable to log in, and no eta of a fix. Has the old dinosaur gone belly up?

These days, directories aren’t hard to run, so it made sense for webmasters to take back the initiative and start their own directories. There are now a huge collection of distributed directories doing a very similar job to the early DMOZ. Wikipedia is providing up-to-date detailed information on any topic you can think of. Google provides a rather good search function.

So where is DMOZ placed in 2006?

There’s a lesson in here somewhere, and it centers around webmasters.

Hat-Tip Shoe.

I recently started a poll on the V7 Network Forums entitled, Do You Trust DMOZ?

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