Forum Moderators: open
Tourist (T) : so, what are all these different types of policeman you have?
Native (N) : ah, well, they all have different responsibilities. The City Police
Department have responsibility for the City. County Sheriff has responsibility
for the County. State Troopers have responsibilities in the whole State. Then
there's Federal, like the FBI. They have responsibility over the whole world,
even as far as Montana!
Here's a quote from the Zeal Guidelines
About Zeal
Zeal is the first enterprise to enable community members to collaborate with
professional editors to create a truly comprehensive Web directory.
That is, of course, the objective of ODP, without the professional editors
inclusion. Zeal, however, probably should have qualified it with the suffix
'for the United States'. Their objectives seem to mirror ODP in principle,
but show themselves up in their approach.
If you are not familiar with the Zeal directory, it is intended to be a volunteer
edited database of non-commercial sites that will be included in Looksmart
and subsequently shown in MSN, AOL et al.
However, a look at the home page demonstrates their not-so global approach.
With a few minor exceptions that can be included in their library-society-countries
categories, all listings outside of the US are classified under their 'Travel' parent
category. In addition, every listing in the Travel, and therefore International,
sections are deemed to be of a Commercial nature.
Hmmm, this means of course, that anything of any interest outside of the
US can possibly only be of any instrinsic value at all, if you want to 'Travel'
there.
Shouldn't a "comprehensive Web directory" have the 'master' parent category
of World/Earth (allowing scaleability for the Moon, Mars etc. later!), subdivided
into regions of which the US is but one offering ?
(This is beginning to overtake the annoying habit of Webmasters to create forms
including all the known possible International Country Codes from which to
choose, only to have the US State 2-digit ID as a 'required field')
That feels better !:)
TC
I think a lot of directories are for historical reasons very US biased. The domain naming system is US biased ... OK the whole Internet is US biased :)
I've got used to but it would be nice to have the directories reorganise themselves to reflect the changing demographics of Internet users. I think if they don't then they will gradually find themselve becoming niche sites catering to US & Canadian users only.
If I were to create one I think I would start off with language as my root and have multiple entries for each site that is in multiple languages... just an idea ;)
the difficulty with that approach is that some subjects will have sites in most languages, others will be pretty limited in many...until this summer we were the only resource of our kind in Spanish...we are still the only one in Arabic, Russian and Chinese
it might work though
