lammert - 7:57 am on Jul 24, 2007 (gmt 0)

Why doesn't a new and improved competitor to DMOZ arise?

I think that getting enough initial critical mass is one of the main problems. For a general purpose directory as DMOZ is, it takes a million or more website listings to be interesting for visitors, and even when targetting one language or theme, a few hundred thousand listings would be needed to be attractive.

In the Netherlands we have a few volunteer powered general purpose directories that are quite popular. Each of these directories list at least a few hundred thousand sites and relies on between 1000 and 2000 volunteers specialized in the categories they edit.

Onze you have the critical mass to be attractive to visitors (or search engines to be considered as an authority like with DMOZ) highly specialized and dedicated volunteers will come almost automatically. There are always people with a lot of knowledge about specific subjects that want to provide that information for free to others, either in directories of website listings or in on-line encyclopedias like Wikipedia. These are often people without the knowledge or interest to start a website on their own, and they need existing infrastructure to publish their knowledge to the public. Small and/or unknown directories will not as easy attract these volunteers as DMOZ or other well known volunteer driven projects.

So in short: in order to attract high quality editors, you need a directory that is already maintained by high quality editors.

The other reason IMO why it is difficult to start a competitor is funding. DMOZ is running without ads, as is wikipedia. This makes them dependent on the generousity of others, like hosting companies providing them with cheap/free hosting, sponsors to cover the basic costs etc. But because of this business model both DMOZ and Wikipedia are able to attract editors who wouldn't be willing to provide their knowledge for free if they knew there was a big money making machine behind the scenes.

Using a small set (100 as suggested in a previous post in this thread) of paid 8-5 workers won't give the same quality as a volunteer driven project. 100 paid workers can certainly process more submissions and website reviews than the same or even larger group of volunteers. But they don't know what to review. They may have the knowledge to decide if a website is nice looking, navigation is OK, etc, but they can simply not decide if the content is original, or authority. An historian specialized in old Etruscan culture will easily know which sites are bogus and just repeat basic or false information, and which sites are the gems about the subject. But a general purpose editor can only judge based on his feelings about a site, not on his knowledge. So even though that historian may only review 10 or so sites per year, he is for the category "Etruscan culture" of much more value than a paid general editor can ever be. If people want an unreviewed listing of sites about Etruscan culture, they can simply use a search engine and find all the relevant sites on the net. The difference the specialized volunteer makes is his ability to decide which sites have really intrinsic value, something neither a search engine, nor a general editor can do.

In my opinion it is the power if the highly specialized volunteer that makes it difficult for competitors to arise. And to attract volunteers you need critical mass created by volunteers, money is of little value in this process as money is the last volunteers need and may actually scare them away.