RIP DMOZ: 1998-2006
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That’s the grim almost tombstone like pronouncement made by Rich Skrenta, DMOZ-founder, although no longer associated with it. He wrote a post entitled ‘DMOZ had 9 lives. Used up yet?‘ He catalogues the lives:
aka Open Directory Project
aka Netscape Open Directory
aka directory.mozilla.org
aka NewHoo
aka GnuHoo
It seems that operational problems at AOL, which now owns DMOZ, coupled with pressures from AOL’s unhappy parent, Time-Warner, mean that DMOZ is now on life-support.
It’s sad since so many editors have given freely and mightily of their time, each to make their own little corner as good as they could. However in total DMOZ was seen by many others as a monolithic organization that unfairly decided which websites should be recognized and which ignored. Now it seems to be slowly fading into obscurity. An apt quotation might be what T.S. Eliot wrote in The Hollow Men: “This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.”
Tip of the hat: Peter Da Vanzo
Tags: DMOZ
BPWrap
December 18th, 2006 at 8:35 pm
Dmoz’s been already dead for quite a long time now. It seems like nobody’s been taking care of it. Sad, it was a nice project.
December 19th, 2006 at 12:41 pm
Aaron from SEOBook.com posted this morning that the site is back up and you can edit listings — the only issue is that DMOZ is still not accepting new submissions.
December 19th, 2006 at 12:46 pm
Thanks, Tamar, for pointing that out. While it may be nice to note that the crew is organizing the deck chairs on the after-deck, I still would like to hear from the captain of this Titanic what exactly is going on.