gibbergibber - 10:46 am on Jul 24, 2007 (gmt 0)

--Volunteer editors (and looking at the Alexa rank, users also) are confident with DMOZ, why switch? --

Dmoz should not exist for the sake of editors, it should exist entirely for the sake of ordinary people trying to find information. Directories aren't a form of self-expression, they're meant to be a useful tool.

The Alexa numbers for dmoz.org are all going down, particularly over the last 18 months: reach, ranking and page views are all taking a steep dive. Its ranking now is 380, but a year ago it was about 150.

--large, long existent and with a history where no successful competitor apeared.--

There was a competitor, it was called Yahoo. In fact Yahoo built its entire business on the directory. And in the 1990s, almost every portal tried to build its own directory, there were loads of them out there.

The fact that Yahoo (along with everyone else) then completely abandoned its directory, despite having literally billions of dollars in the bank, does imply that it's not a viable concept.

This reminds me of that scene in Other People's Money, where Danny Devito's character points out that the very last "buggy whip" (horse whip) factory probably made the best buggy whips ever produced, and had no rivals at all. That still wasn't enough to justify its existence, because everyone had moved on to driving cars instead of being pulled by horses.

[edited by: gibbergibber at 10:54 am (utc) on July 24, 2007]