hutcheson - 6:14 pm on Jul 9, 2007 (gmt 0)

The ODP isn't a "bright idea," and no bright idea will ever compete with it. (Ideas are a dime a gross these days: the internet has depressed that market seriously, since all the world's ideas are available for free at your fingertips. And replicated work is somewhat worse than worthless. Unique effort is all that matters.)

It's a socio-economic system which is merely one of many IMPLEMENTATIONS of the "obvious" idea of "using the web to facilitate cooperative work on a very large project." (It isn't even the only cooperative web indexing project. It's merely the only one remaining.)

The question is, suppose someone WANTED to cooperate on an ODP-like project. (Clearly, not everyone does.) Would he be better off by making the ODP better, or starting to build a similar project from scratch? Well, obviously, making the ODP better would be a better return on investment UNLESS:

(1) the ODP tools were so flawed as to impose significant inefficiencies in directory building (which is simply not the case: the tools are a joy to use, fast, efficient, and intuitive.)

(2) the ODP community is, for some reason or another, excluding enough likeminded people capable of building their own competing community. Now the ODP certainly excludes a lot of people, some of whom are certainly interested in building a directory, some of which are certainly capable of building a directory, and some of which are certainly capable of building a community.

The questions then are:

(a) The social question: is the intersection of those three groups large enough to replicate (more or less) what the ODP community has already done, in order to begin building the "better" part? (I suspect not.)

(b) The economic question: given the niche market of general-purpose web directories, would those people choose to to go through the effort of go do that, rather than doing something else that hadn't already been done? (Again, I suspect not.)

The information system economy tends to support no more than three visible players in each market: the big commercial effort, one big public effort, and a small commercial competitor.

Thus in operating systems: MS-Wind, Linux, Apple
In browsers: MS-Exploder, Mozilla/Firefox, Opera
In directories: Yahoo, ODP, MSN
In personal finance: Quickbooks, (name escapes me at the moment), MSN Money
In word processors: MS-*urd, OpenOffice, WordPerfect
and so on.

I suspect the reason for this is: by nature, it's hard to motivate people to cooperate in competing with a cooperative project -- they either focus on competition (and thus can't work with each other) or on cooperation (in which case they just cooperate with the other cooperators.) And I suspect (hope) that most of the cooperative, knowledgeable people that the ODP loses, either participate in other information-based projects, or go off to focus on building (on their own) the specific bits that the large projects are lacking.

I would like to see new ways of indexing the information content of the web. But I suspect that any new way that was sufficiently user-oriented to be of interest to me (as a user, and as an advocate of other users) would be complementary, not competitive, with the existing models (Wiki, directory, search index). And if such a new way appeared, many ODP editors would be among its most enthusiastic users.