hutcheson - 6:37 pm on Jul 20, 2007 (gmt 0)

>If DMOZ wants to reinvigorate itself, I would suggest that its defenders re-engage the users (which are largely webmasters these days) by participating in open discussions and acknowledging legitimate concerns and criticisms.

This is the fundamental perceptual difference that so often makes communication impossible.

A webmaster has one concept of what constitutes "use." The ODP founders have another: and one of the most important unique aspects of the ODP is its definition of "use." The project simply CANNOT give that up: it would cost it its community also. And that WOULD be death.

You can also see this fundamental dichotomy in dataguy's statistics. If you extrapolated his growth rate per employee to, a user-oriented directory, you could easily enough estimate, say, Yahoo's expected current size as the close order of magnitude of 50 million sites. This is off by more than an order of magnitude. Obviously we're in different niches -- which is good because there's no point in duplicating effort. Dataguy is welcome to all the use webmasters want to give him, and the ODP can remain its focus on surfers.

Again, there are zillions of sites that purport to serve webmasters -- and there's simply no need for another one. (In addition, of course, your typical editor attracted by the ODP ideal simply isn't interested in building another one.)

Which is fine.

But any attempt at communication must determine first of all what common interest there is. And in this case there really isn't much, so a successful conversation will nearly always end in "OK, you're not interested in my interests, and I'm not interested in yours ... let's each go look for someone else to talk to."

Which is fine. There's room for lots of different interests on the web.