RandomDot - 7:21 pm on Oct 3, 2007 (gmt 0)

First of all: Scalability is not always the answer. It's not always about getting as much as possible in the least time possible with the least effort required. An example would be larger corporations who has whole media departments to work on a presentation which is going to be used for one meeting and never to be seen again after that.

Secondly: The flaw with most directories which has been made on the internet are exactly that they go beyond what they have the resources to accomplish. They add as much as they can, without editorial review of what is listed on a regular basis, updating and removing and finding other notable works - and they can be paid, and bribed and persuaded to list even the most unoriginal and worst resources on everything and anything on the internet - because they are serving commercial interests - thus it makes it biased, very, very biased.

Dmoz has survived until now, as a trusted resource because it has not made that mistake - it's not about scalability, or about revenue models, or anything than trying to provide good resources on the topics they cover - in the way they think is the best way to do it.. They don't have unlimited resources, people aren't being paid to do it, so they actually can't go for scalability, or in a flicker of a moment sell out of the quality of it because the investors wanted a little more bang for their bucks.. They can only, and I mean only, count on remaining a quality resource with the help of those people who do like to contribute, and do the really, really, annoying and not-for-profit job nobody else wants to do - but from which everybody else benefits - if you look beyond your own interests.

The only thing an editor there can do with his work is to write it on his CV. "Editor of [category] at Dmoz.org from 2005-2007" - again, it's not a business resource, or a search engine resource - it's there to use for anybody and take data from - because it tries to be a good and fair resource on different aspects of the internet, and structure it to the best of their intentions.. not that's it's always successfull, but it has until now done a good job at it. Just when I think back at the original netscape directory .. dmoz has come a very long way since then - and I can only imagine what it will be in ten years.

The Digg style simply ... wouldn't work with Dmoz. It's not alot of people on digg who actually controls it .. it's very few, and they're doing the work of voting things up and down - hell, for all we know the guy who owns it might just add 1245 votes to a digg and sell the traffic to the highest bidder (just an example, again, with commercial itnerests...) and because of that small community ... it's in their interests of what is to be seen and what is to be buried. Dmoz as a Dmoz This! - wouldn't work as an authority resource - just a very, very biased resources serving a few hundred peoples interests on what should be seen and what shouldn't. Besides from that ... digg might give a few sites a 8000 visitors today - but most would simply get buried under a rock and never see the light of day again. With dmoz they might get 8001 visitors over the span of 10 years. That's one more, and perhaps it's worth betting on more than one horse, or just build the racetrack if you really want to own the game..