hutcheson - 1:13 am on Jul 22, 2007 (gmt 0)

>If good companies are missing from DMOZ listings, neither justice nor surfers are well-served.

Editors don't judge "good" (or "bad") companies. The ODP lists Microsoft, the Catholic Church, Communist parties, and Celine Dion. I can't imagine what any company could possibly do that would be worse than all of those.

Again, the ODP doesn't list "companies". It lists websites. Some companies don't have anything listable to put on a website--regardless of their "moral virtue." Other companies, with earned reputations for providing genuinely unique services, don't have websites, or haven't PUT anything listable on their websites. (I know this, because whenever I purchase services from a local professional firm, or deal with a local organization, I ask if it has a website.) Neither justice nor editors nor social benefit has anything to do with any of that.

Justice, of course, demands that abusive submitters be punished. We can't punish anyone, but in extreme cases we can refuse to help them. We take this step reluctantly, because it's the Open Directory, not the Justice League, and our purpose is to help surfers. Justice isn't served, but probably surfers are helped, by not being turned over to rude, selfish people. But we don't do that to help surfers, or to be just: we do that just to protect the ODP and its editors.

And finally, what serves surfers? If an unlisted company has "competitors" that would provide the same or comparable services, then a surfer is served, even though he doesn't find all the possible service providers.

So I can say this with some confidence: if you are concerned that surfers can't find you and will find someone else instead (and receive satisfaction there), everyone ought to recognize your concern as reliable evidence that surfers won't be harmed by not finding your site...and therefore surfers are best served by ODP editors looking for sites that DON'T have adequate competitors already listed.

Which brings us back to the shrinkage in Shopping. Of course, the number of online shoppers has anything to do with the number of sites. (Anyone who has studied economics or history should understand the concept of "industry consolidation.")

The question is the same here as it is in any other category. (1) Is the surfer adequately served by what's listed, (2) can I by my effort make a difference in how well the surfer is served, (3) is there a better place (some other ODP category, some none-ODP activity) for me to make a difference with my skills?

Everyone has the same three questions. Each person answers only for himself. But if the ODP gets a large enough collection of sufficiently diverse people, then it has a statistically-valid picture of what society in general thinks is important.

And the answer may well be: having access to more shopping sites is not as important to people as you think it is. My personal theory is that, as anonymous and pseudonymous shopping sites get more common, anyone would be a fool to order anything from any website where he didn't know the owners personally. And, as shoppers get more sophisticated, large companies will focus on establishing real-world reputations, and small companies will "purchase reputation insurance" by selling through reputable aggregators like Ebay.

So I would expect the number of worthwhile online shopping sites to shrink -- bearing in mind that a shopping site isn't worthwhile unless the company's reputation has preceded it even in the real world, because with so many credit card thieves and other scams out there, it's just not worth the risk.

On the other hand, I'd expect the number of local shops advertising online on their own to grow. And I'd expect that human editors could review local websites much more effectiviely, because of their personal local knowledge. So I'd expect the ODP Regional categories to be growing.

If that's what's happening, I'll be unsurprised. If that's not what's happening, I'll accept the reality gracefully: I know, and I don't mind, that I can't impose my personal notions of importance on the world. I'm just happy that, with the web, it only takes one other person on earth with the same interest, and we can share. So there's a possibility for building communities that has never existed before.

The downside of this is, if a person has few interests, or is obsessed on one single interest, he can lose contact altogether with reality: he can find people to reinforce that interest. This forum, for instance, is obsessively monomaniacal--there are some bright, helpful people here, but it impacts reality at only one point (a point having nothing to do with the ODP, so far as I can tell). I wouldn't ever think of getting my dose of reality here, although it's a morbidly-fascinating picture into some popular delusions. Someone who only visits this and other "professional webmaster" forums is really going to be out of touch. It's important, I think, to deal with people who are doing, well, different things: and there are all sorts of places where you can find them. The community forums of content-building communities breathe a completely different atmosphere. Wherever you imagine going, whatever you even hear about doing, someone in the community has been there, done that for years, and the people who AREN'T experts in THAT will shut up and listen to the expert. The people are so different, that (aside from insatiable curiosity) there's nothing in common, not even language. So people just don't assume that the whole world sees through their own biasses--they KNOW the person NEXT to them DOESN'T. In such an environment, the facile assumption that "there OUGHT to be MORE (or LESS) people doing this because _I_ think it's important" can't even get started. You learn that if you think it's important enough to do, you shut up and do it, and if you don't think it's important enough for you to do, you can start getting used to it not getting done: but (provided you don't have some kind of conviction that the universe owes you a living in the coin you prefer) you can also get used to a constant stream of pleasant surprises.