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I had not know DMOZ was the early basis of some part of Google... Sad to see the loss of the scaffolding of the web -- but it is true that communities move on or at least individuals do. Glad Archive.org and others are making a copy of it -- but you can't as easily make an archival copy of a community.

One issue with DMOZ was that you got (at the time) at most two listings per item. The book "The Disciple of Organizing" shows instead how one can have a facet-based approach with multiple categories instead of, or in addition to, to a single hierarchical one.

Some of our listing for work by my wife and I from way back when (and the sadness is also much more for remaining unrealized potential on the projects -- still wanting to redo them in JavaScript for the browser -- than just DMOZ's passing):
http://www.dmoz.org/search?q=k...

Kurtz-Fernhout Software
Formerly commercial programs now available for free. Garden with Insight is a garden simulator, and PlantStudio is botanical illustration software.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/
Home > Gardening > Landscaping
[That should really have been under Science > Software > Simulation]

Embedded Squeak, Speech Synthesizer
By Kurtz-Fernhout Software: version 1.0 for Squeak 2.2, by Paul Fernhout. Zip file has standalone Exe file to run Squeak in Win95 text-only console, and all source code (VC++ 5.0, Squeak 2.2) to produce it. [Open Source, Squeak license]
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
Computers > Programming > Languages > Smalltalk > Squeak > Software

PlantStudio
Tool for creating pictures of 3D plants. It simulates herbaceous (non-woody) plants like wildflowers and cut flowers, vegetables, weeds, grasses, and herbs using a parameter-driven simulation of plant growth and structure.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
Computers > Software > Graphics > 3D > Rendering and Modelling

StoryHarp Audioventure Interactive Fiction
Voice-operated interactive fiction including text-to-speech, sounds and music.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
Games > Video Games > Adventure > Text Adventures > Design and Development > Authoring Systems

OSCOMAK: Open Source Community On Manufacturing Knowledge
Goal: create a distributed global repository of production knowledge of past, present and future processes, materials, products.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
Computers > Open Source > Open Content

oops, bad URL! This one works: https://www.dmoz.org/rdf/struc...

I fantasized about stealing their category hierarchy RDF file (i.e., structure.rdf.u8.gz ) - for building a classification thingamajig of my own. Here's their short sample: http://rdf.dmoz.org/rdf/struct...

What exactly would another CEO have done differently?

From the perspective of a long-time and fairly active flickr user, one thing they could have done was given the users the features they have constantly been asking for, instead of constant "UX" changes that (a) no one wanted and (b) removed useful features.

From the perspective of a groups user, bringing the groups up to, oh, say, the 2005 level of message display and convenience might have done something for them. It would have been nice not to have to wade through pages-long dumps of people's CSS, and to have some kind of rational quoting mechanism, too.

Their email system is junk. They could simply have had someone write them a decent email client. Although I have to say, Google hasn't got one either, so that appears to be a more general failure of vision than just a Yahoo-centric problem.

I'm not sure how others feel about this, but when Yahoo tossed out the curated tree of sites and replaced it with just another clumsy search along the lines of Google's, I stopped using them to find anything. Google, which has the best search I've found so far, is awful compared to a decently curated list, which, for a while anyway, was a reasonable description of Yahoo's offering. Yahoo failed to give that effort the resources it needed, and consequently fell so far behind in keeping it up to date it became fossilized, while also attempting to monetize it in a way that was both inherently offensive and reduced its value via link-buying (much as Google has done with search)

I still go to DMOZ for many things instead of Google, because Google is nothing less than inundated with irrelevance. The problem with Google's search is that "popularity" is the underlying metric, whereas what I'm typically looking for is quality -- whereas "popularity" is the metric that reliably retrieves mediocrity. Once you get through the advertising spam, of course.

Speaking of popular, Yahoo's early bought-it property Geocities was a hive of... well, you know. But it was also 10+ million web pages that they just tossed in the garbage. I doubt that earned them any friends. At all. The stats had Geocities as the 3rd most-visited place on the web originally; good job wasting that opportunity.

And that's just what I know about. With all of the services Yahoo has offered over the years, I'm sure there were (and are) other visible points of weakness that could have been addressed. For the services I have used, not one of them was ever given the time and resources they needed to extend their potential in even the most obvious ways.

What I see here is a company that really doesn't know what its doing and doesn't pay attention to its customer input. All they do is in the crudest and ham-handed way possible, take whatever they have and try to monetize it no matter what that does to the user's experience, resources, and data. Of course you want to monetize things, but you have to monetize things that have value to the user, and if you don't pay attention to the latter, why, you could end up having to "spin off" your stuff because with all your user-abusive monetizing in place, you don't end up with, you know, users.

know better than to use C++

Ever heard of 'brainfuck'?

Info @ http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/...

Thanks to Nerval's Lobster, after Python, PHP, Java and now C++, now my brain is totally fucked

And oh, there's even an IDE for it

http://4mhz.de/bfdev.html

Seriously, no hand-edited directory has been able to keep pace with WWW content for... ten years now? fifteen?

For those who don't mind the lag: DMOZ - the Open Directory Project.

I don't know how many links are still good, but there seems to be a good list of news clients at the Open Directory. If you're in Windows, FWIW, the readers I've liked the most are Xnews and Forte Agent.

I figure that if we can all pick a particular group, it will be a good place to coordinate/discuss any protests (Slashdot is deleting posts/sigs that even suggest anything) and hang out during the boycott at the very least.

They talk a big game, but when push comes to shove, let's face facts - most 'Christians' in America ('cuz let's face it, when we say "religion," they're the group we're likely discussing) don't give a fuck about helping the poor. They just don't.

Quite bullshit.

Ah, ok... so? Where's the proof that the majority of self-proclaimed "Christians" actually do, directly, help the poor? Because it ain't in the website you linked to.

Where is your proof that the majority "don't give a fuck about helping the poor"?

You mean, aside from pretty much anything any member of the Religious Right ever says?

Do I really need any more proof than that? I guess I could link a bunch of articles about how the "Christian" leadership of the town I live in are constantly trying to drive the Victory Mission out (a REAL Christian organization, look 'em up).

Actually, there you go - go find some articles on how the Reverend Larry Rice is received by his "Brothers in Christ." You might be shocked at how much hatred "Christians" have for a man whose goal in life is abolishing poverty and homelessness.

I don't, but I'm not black, either, but I still feel the need to defend them when racists make unfounded stereotypical statements about them. Same goes for religious folk of whatever stripe.

So, you defend baby-sacrificing Bokonists, too? What about White Supremacists, or Neo-Nazis? You gonna defend them against unfair stereotypes as well?

See, here's your problem - you just want to be adversarial, which leads you to say ignorant shit because you don't know better. You ignore the fact that I make a distinction between people who are "Christian" in name only and the true Followers of Christ, because you're too busy being butthurt that someone said something you don't like about a group you've taken it upon yourself to defend, right or wrong.

That's on you, buddy, not me. Try to be more selective and thoughtful in the future.

So, what have you, personally, done to help the destitute?

That's quite a long list, although it's more than just the "destitute", which we simply don't have many of around here, what with food stamps and welfare and public housing and everything else available to them. At least there is some help coming out of that 60% of my labor that various governments confiscate from me. Too bad so much of it goes to killing brown people and oppressing 3rd world countries.

So... nothing then.

Shame, that.

They talk a big game, but when push comes to shove, let's face facts - most 'Christians' in America ('cuz let's face it, when we say "religion," they're the group we're likely discussing) don't give a fuck about helping the poor. They just don't.

Quite bullshit.

Ah, ok... so? Where's the proof that the majority of self-proclaimed "Christians" actually do, directly, help the poor? Because it ain't in the website you linked to.

Where is your proof that the majority "don't give a fuck about helping the poor"? Because that was your assertion, which the link, with all those Christian organizations helping the poor, and all that money going to do it, must come from ... somewhere? Is it a bunch of atheists donating to those Christian organizations? They sure as hell aren't getting it from government bureaucrats.

FWIW, if you claim yourself to be a "Christian," then that last little line only serves to prove my contention right.

I don't, but I'm not black, either, but I still feel the need to defend them when racists make unfounded stereotypical statements about them. Same goes for religious folk of whatever stripe.

So, what have you, personally, done to help the destitute?

That's quite a long list, although it's more than just the "destitute", which we simply don't have many of around here, what with food stamps and welfare and public housing and everything else available to them. At least there is some help coming out of that 60% of my labor that various governments confiscate from me. Too bad so much of it goes to killing brown people and oppressing 3rd world countries.

They talk a big game, but when push comes to shove, let's face facts - most 'Christians' in America ('cuz let's face it, when we say "religion," they're the group we're likely discussing) don't give a fuck about helping the poor. They just don't.

Quite bullshit.

Ah, ok... so? Where's the proof that the majority of self-proclaimed "Christians" actually do, directly, help the poor? Because it ain't in the website you linked to.

Sorry your momma didn't love you - there's no need to project your ill feelings on the people that are, collectively, the most philanthropic in the world.

Sorry you feel the need to attack and insult someone else so you can feel justified in your self-rightous fervor. FWIW, if you claim yourself to be a "Christian," then that last little line only serves to prove my contention right.

So, what have you, personally, done to help the destitute? Other than say "Dur, the Salvation Army exists!" and call people names, that is.

They talk a big game, but when push comes to shove, let's face facts - most 'Christians' in America ('cuz let's face it, when we say "religion," they're the group we're likely discussing) don't give a fuck about helping the poor. They just don't.

Quite bullshit.

Sorry your momma didn't love you - there's no need to project your ill feelings on the people that are, collectively, the most philanthropic in the world.

If the ISPs quit insisting on these fake "unlimited" bandwidth plans, there wouldn't be a need to have weird rules to stop people from running high-bandwidth servers.

We built a distributed network that is so self healing it's resistant to nuclear attacks -- Entire cities can disappear and packets get routed around the lost nodes momentarily...

And what did they do? They built Centralized Data Silos and protocols that exclusively use the antiquated Client / Server architecture despite there being no distinction of client or server at the packet or link level. Perhaps, centralizing the damn data is the bandwidth problem... Yeah, really, that's the problem. Oh, if only there were a distributed file system and a trust management system like the PGP protocol, then we could actually use it to reduce bandwidth via decentralization. Oh if only there were such a thing as Distributed Hash Tables we could index said data and do distributed searches too. Hell, people might would even be able to manually create a better SPAM-free categorized index. It would be so good that automated search tools would spider from it to build their own indexes...

Alas, no. Like a bunch of kids playing with the box the expensive gadget came in everyone keeps using the International Conglomeration of Data Silos AKA the World Wide Web.

Long Live the Internet, but Fuck The Web.

That's really not true. Yahoo started out as the best directory of web content in its time. Then Google came along and people stopped using hierarchical directories in favor of free-form search. I don't even know where you can find directories now, out side of dmoz. Well http://www.dmoz.org/ says "powered by AOL Search" and "Copyright Netscape 2103." Hey look at this , Yahoo! still has the directory! Link! http://dir.yahoo.com/ Altavista seems not to.

it went away.

Um, no, it didn't.

Would this help?

The one good thing that comes from this is the pressure to get a decent mesh network up and running. Here's hoping for a swift solution.

http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html

This essay could be considered supporting Alan Kay's suggestion that
"the computer revolution hasn't happened yet".
http://squeakland.org/school/HTML/essays/face_to_face.html

Why Educational Technology Has Failed Schools
by Paul D. Fernhout
January, 2007

Educational technology has been a big success at homes, in libraries, in
museums, and in business.

Let's say you have an interest in, say, Aardvarks. At home and want to
know the weight of a typical aardvark right now? Google it:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=aardvark+weight
Want to buy one? :-) Try Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Wild-Safari-Aardvark/dp/B000H6H4VK
Want to sell one you no longer need? Try ebay:
http://cgi.ebay.com/Aardvark-Direct-Pro-Q10-PCI-Audio-Interface-w-CubaseLE_W0QQitemZ270076288454QQihZ017QQcategoryZ64446QQcmdZViewItem
Want to collaborate with others on making one better? Try sourceforge:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/aardvark
Want a 3D simulation written by an aardvark?
http://flyawaysimulation.com/article746.html
Want to make your own educational simulation about aardvarks? Try one of
the tools linked here:
http://www.ambrosine.com/resource.html
An endless variety of information related to just one arbitrary topic,
easily accessible using Google or another search engine.

At the library, want to find a good book on, say, Zebras? Use an online
library catalog system:
http://leopac.nypl.org/ipac20/ipac.jsp?menu=search&aspect=basic&npp=10&ipp=20&ri=&index=GW&term=zebras

Want to make a museum kiosk showing protein folding in action in 3D? Write
a simulation with Python:
https://simtk.org/search/?type_of_search=soft&words=&topics=18+307

Does your business need to know more about "quality control" to prevent
customer complaints? Lots of online resources:
http://search.dmoz.org/cgi-bin/search?search=quality+control
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_control

So, at home, library, museum, or business, technology is delivering the
goods (physical or digital) and making these places all a lot better.

With all that technological success in other areas, why are schools still
considered a problem area, see:
"To fix US schools, [bipartisan] panel says, start over"
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1215/p01s01-ussc.html
Or in other words, why has technology failed in compulsory schools?
Clearly something is wrong here -- technology is helping make these other
places more productive and more flexible -- but in schools, there is not
much change, despite a huge expenditure in technology and training.

Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting
"learning on d

It's a pity web directories such as the Open Directory Project have fallen by the wayside in the mind of the general public. (Alexa ranks dmoz at No. 460.) If a web directory had the same personal investment end users worldwide give Wikipedia it could provide a useful alternative to algorithm-based search engines. Although Wikipedia already is a web directory of sorts, with links to relevant sites at the end of articles, as well as numerous "list of" articles pointing to sites you might never encounter searching through Google.

.

you use the tools most suited for the job

Indeed.

However, there is a whole wide world of very interesting non-Microsoft systems out there. If you concentrate on learning Microsoft technologies (e.g. the .NET stack and its languages) you will be confined to the Microsoft ecosystem. Don't try to tell me that .NET is portable: for all serious jobs, it is only works on Windows.

When you go to learn a new language or platform, it should be something you enjoy. Unix and especially Linux are the friendliest platforms for developers. The jobs for Linux developers are much better too, far more interesting. Your job should be personally interesting and fulfilling, if at all possible. A substantial part of your life is spent at work. Yes, we must work to pay the bills, but you should try very hard to get a job that gives you personal satisfaction or you are wasting your life.

I think that most people would agree that writing boring old GUI front ends to database applications in a .NET language is not a great way to spend your life.

Since Microsoft is so ubiquitous, and there are large numbers of developers for Microsoft's platforms, you risk becoming one of the interchangeable, cheap programmers.

Having said that, there are interesting languages available for the ,NET CLR, but you're as good as tying yourself to Windows.

There are as good and better languages available for the JVM, which is properly cross-platform. Also, there are many vendors of JVMs to choose from, not just Oracle.

If you are going to learn a new language in your own time, on your own dime, you'd better make it interesting and a bit different, not just another C#, Java, PHP... That's why I suggested Scheme and D. I would have suggested Haskell too, and maybe FORTH, but they are a bit "far out." I haven't tried Haskell myself yet, but a friend has and he loves it.

You're an applied mathematics student, so look for applied math projects. That way, you're newbie skills will be best put to use leveraging what you already know. There'll still be plenty you'll have to learn along the way, so put what you know to good use. Instead of projects like boost, sage, or octave, look for projects that have heavy applied math requirements like BRL-CAD, Blender, CGAL, and many many others.

Pick a community that interests you. Download the source code, compile and run the software, find their bug list, start fixing bugs. Introduce yourself when you have something useful to contribute (not just vaporware) or if you get stuck and need help.

Plenty of math-specific projects at http://www.dmoz.org/Science/Math/Software/ too.

So, that might give you an idea what they think good quality map data is worth. They're putting GPS and Ovi Maps into every new phone.

Google are out driving the streets, correcting and putting stuff on top of Tele Atlas data. Also an expensive proposition.

Mapping, is expensive.

Here's the thing. What is a map for? To find out where you are and what's round about you. So... In an urban context, people are looking for things like public transport, restaurants, shops, each other etc etc.Golden opportunity to put advertising services on top of the map data. Hence Google, an advertising company.

What does Nokia get out of it? Well, they already have a handset in every pocket. Add a GPS, and you have a massive geolocation system.

How do you make money as OpenStreetMap to keep running? Get in touch with the Open Directory project http://www.dmoz.org/ they have a directory of things, you have a directory of places.

I kinda liked the human-generated Yahoo! index / hierarchy, it was a neat way to get started with the web, back when it wasn't all too big and time-sensitive to organize by hand.

Actually, that was the Open Directory Project that built the data that Yahoo directory was based on. I was an editor there for a few years about 10 years ago. Pretty nice idea, and when search engines really sucked at finding what you wanted back then, it could be a great alternative. But, there's just too much Web content out there for any human powered directory to deal with.

SeaMonkey also has decent Gopher support. Firefox, with the Overbite extension, becomes a really great Gopher client. For more information I'd suggest the relevant category of the Open Directory Project.

Disregard the negative commentary (like any teacher is trying to fail students ... grow up!)

In order of priority:

a) spreadsheets - Excel, OpenOffice, whatever. How could anyone do a lab without using one for tables, calcs, and graphing? Make them mandatory for experiment reports;

b) Latex - to show there is a paradigm other than WORD and its the software for writing journal articles.

Finally, check out this site. I've only ever seen free molecule visualization software (eg - PyMOL) but there might be some other stuff.

From TFA:

83. And Taco Bell was never a taco company.
In an interview with the New York Times conducted in the wake of Yahoo’s decision to outsource its search features to Microsoft, Yahoo boss Carol Bartz says that Yahoo has “never been a search company.”

Carol Bartz is correct--Yahoo started out as a link collection, then a hierarchical directory (basically like http://www.dmoz.org/ then added a lot of portal services (including email, stock quotes, etc).

The thing that they never had, until 2004, was a search engine; Yahoo put other company's searches on their site (including Inktomi for a while, and then Google up until 2004). Doing that with Bing is just returning to what they've done historically.

The answer to your question "What motivation do they have to restrict access by some subset of users?" is: restricting access to information posted by those who oppose their political agenda is a fairly strong motive.

And as soon as that happens searchers can point their browsers to other search engines. Though I use mostly Google I still use Alta Vista. I also use About.com, Teoma (now Ask.com), Cuil, DMoz, and Mooter.

Falcon

Could be any number of ways:

http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Hacking/Exploits/

Conway's "Life" plays itself, player pianos play themselves, soccer matches on the TV play themselves (as far as we're concerned) — what's new here?

http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Usenet/Public_News_Servers/

Choose a name that someone's already using, and then seize their domain for using that name?

In my understanding using and obvious cybersquatting isn't the same thing in court. If I'm not mistaken these issues occur very frequently, sort of. A while back Madonna sezied madonna.com, which was used as a legitimate adult site, not related to madonna at all. Madonna means virgin, which of course is also very related to the porn industry, so it wasn't a question of copying Madonnas brand, but rather another use for the name. Of course Madonna won this case, as you understand, and thus she could seize madonna.com.

This example might not be 100% related to the issue at hand, but it proves that domain seizures due to trademark can and have occurred across markets.

And FYI just because there was no outrage on Slashdot it doesn't mean it didn't happen. :)

Careful, there. In the phone book, a company does not pay for their advertisement to be placed "next to a competitor's advertisement." When a company buys an ad in the Yellow Pages, they buy it for a particular category, which will be the same category as their competitor. If the ads are next to one another, it is because it was convenient for the page layout, or because of alphabetical ordering, or some other such serendipity.

Apropos to this, Spangenberg and her company would not have a leg to stand on if they sued Open Directory for having a bunch of other companies in the same listing, because those results are based on categories which are not trademarks. Google's sponsored links seem to be triggered by the trademarked name; that is the bone they have to pick.

It's actually from The Open Directory (DMOZ).

There're also things like the Open Directory and the software listed here. However, I imagine it is hard to really break into the search engine game without lots of money!

Tough times put a hard squeeze on advertising dollars and google spam words, are a tough sell even at a low price.

When it comes to search engines google, msn and yahoo are all prety much the same, with each of them at times producing slightly better results than the the others. The be honest the only search engine that I have found to far out perform the others in terms of giving me the answers I am looking for, wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine and there is of course http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/Searching/Search_Engines// the open directory project.

But the Open Directory Project.

Some care about security, some care about other things...

See comments that explain what each one's selling point is.

http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/E-mail/

DMoz is what Google Directory's based on

( why should Goog do all the work, when DMoz can do the work & have the results rebranded as Goog & presented as such? )

http://www.google.com/Top/Computers/Internet/E-mail/ for them of us who prefer Goog's modded version.

Try "Free", "Services", or "Web Based" subdirectories, and explore to yer heart's content.

Usenet is still everything that you describe. I don't know why people keep insisting it's dead when in fact it's up and running and doing fine. (Maybe it's because Slashdot is a glorified web forum so is biased against Usenet use.) Just get a properly run text-only feed (I use news.individual.net for a nominal fee of EUR 10 per year which is about USD 15) and enjoy your spam-free text-based Usenet experience. You pay for it and not advertisers, so your privacy is safe. With a decent newsreader you get far better functionality in terms of threading, killfiles, speed, etc. than webforums have ever offered.

Disagree. It is entirely possible that a human vetted page of topic specific links is way more relevant and useful than what you might get on a google first search robot created page of links. I mean, you've never gone to say a hobbiest or enthusiast board and seen their "useful links" collections? There's a big difference between an algorithym generated page of links and a page where a set of human eyeballs has verified every link there as being useful and on topic. How about DMOZ? Is that a link farm?

To be clear, I am not defending those typosquatters sort of link farms, or those bogus DNS redirects you see sometimes from ISPs, but this isn't an example of one of those. We need two different names here, people are equating two different things as the same, that's the part I disagree with, aloing with the completely obvious fact/data/reality that the only thing google does is to index then supply a link farm to you, and they fund it by selling advertising. They do it big scale with so-so results on your first search, he is doing it very small and niche scale with loads more accurate results, because he individually verifies his links as being relevant, with google you sort of have to keep working at it a lot of times to get to something relevant.

  If google was tasking a human being with verifying any random page of links they serve to you, I could see it being the same, but they don't, he does, *that's* the difference. If he buys or sells ads, etc, as far as I can see, he didn't violate any contractual terms, he isn't doing anything different that happens say on the forex exchange daily or the futures markets. That's business, buy (or produce) low, sell higher, do it quickly and efficiently and that's it, that's how that works.

    Google does sumular, they sell high value words to the highest bidder, they aren't "fair", they go for maximum profits. Google just didn't like it because he embarrassed them, his page of topic specific links is much better than theirs, and he made more money than they do on a page. Sometimes you just got to say tough shit, that's it, he did better and certainly got rewarded for it.

  And google ain't nuthin but a money machine for the folks there, let us not forget that either. Instead of ranking the guy and penalizing him they should have hired him, he obviously is smarter in some respects than they have been. And as to "links to links", that's what the internet is! A huge collection of hyperlinked pages! So what? You've never followed a link and found a similar page that has some different links then maybe some of the same links? This isn't uncommon at all, it's how it works sometimes, especially within some smaller specific niche. How about topic specific web page "rings"? You can click on "next" in some link ring, or go to any of the sites in the ring usually and see all the links at once. What's wrong with that?

Sorry, google just got beat at business in this case, stuff happens. He used a bog standard business technique called arbitrage, nothing at all unusual about that at all, it is by far one of the more common things in business. And he combined that principle with building a web page that was relevant enough that it got a ton of traffic.

Google is getting in everybody's space

While Google's there when I want it, they aren't in my space.

Google's products are not generally better, (often flakey or worse (consider google docs and gmail - so what? the only advantage they offer is that they are free

Unless your employer, or you for that matter, demand you use Google's apps you don't have to. Even if you want free software, a lot of the software on my computer is open source, I have none of Google's software on it. I don't even use gmail.

They have already destroyed the search market because only crazy people would start up a search company and go up against them.

Google has gained dominance in searches because it offers better searches than most other search engines. However the new SE Cuil looks pretty good too. I haven't really used it yet but I also use About.com, Alta Vista, Teoma, oops Ask.com, and Open Directory Project for searches.

They are busily destroying most other markets too.

And what markets are these?

Falcon

'here are strategic reasons to not want a single source for a critical material. There are no such strategic reasons relating to Google.'

I'd rate data as pretty critical

I can, and do, go to Teoma, oops Ask.com, About.com, Alta Vista, and Dmoz Open Directory Project for searches. And I may start using Cuil as well for searching. Google isn't the only search engine, nor does it have lockin, other than being a good search engine. Actually I use About.com because Google referred me to it, when I first googled for "Monte Verde" archeology the top result was About.com's section of Monte Verde. Now it's number three. Googling for photography returns About.com as number 4.

While data may be, is critical, it can be gotten from search engines other than Google.

Falcon

Seriously, though. There are very, very few people left who use the USENET for anything real.

You should write to all these independent Usenet providers. Maybe you'll convince them to have an epiphany and instantly drop their service to their hundreds of thousands of customers.

I mean, give me a break, the alt groups were a problem 10 years ago, and some ISPs are still carrying them? That's just stupid. When we were carrying the alt groups at BEST we had to set the article timeout for the high-bandwidth groups to 1-day, and that actually did a pretty good job stopping all the idiots trying to download 5000 part port movies over their dialup modems. They just couldn't keep up before the stuff timed out.

You're confusing alt.* and alt.binaries.*. There are plenty of good and active text groups in alt.*. In modern terms, the bandwidth they consume is insignificant. There is no reason you should have to carry binaries.

And then of course there's the Big 8 hierarchies, which you conveniently declared dead right along with alt.binaries.* even though none of them carry any binaries. Please stop conflating issues.

You forgot a biggie: decentralized distribution. Get your Usenet feed from your local (or otherwise preferred) site. If one Usenet site goes down or goes crappy, simply switch to another one. Conversely, if your favourite web forum goes away, you're fucked.

http://www.dmoz.org/ This is nothing new, the concept/technology has been around for years.

Sounds a lot like Dmoz to me! http://www.dmoz.org/ The problem with such sites - the Internet is just too BIG!

Wikia has been something of a dud. What Wikia really does is monetize fancruft. Their big wikis are for Star [Trek|Wars|Gate|Craft], Everquest, Marvel comics, Yu-Gi-Oh, and similar subjects. They're the resting place for fan articles thrown out of Wikipedia.

Wikia's search engine, based on the user demographic they have now, is going to have great coverage of furry fan fiction.

There's already a good manually-updated search engine. It's called Open Directory. It's quite useful as a data source for answering the question "what is this web site about"? It tends to run months behind changes to the web, since it's manually updated. While not many people query DMOZ manually, it's used by Yahoo, Google, etc. to get some basic information about a web site.

As an example of how great Wikia search is going to be, Wales suggested searching for "Tampa hotels". The major search engines return too many bottom-feeder reseller and directory sites for searches like that. As I point out occasionally, we've already solved that problem over at SiteTruth, which looks for business legitimacy. Type in "Tampa hotels" there and watch it push the marginal sites to the bottom of the search results. We have that one handled.

Wikipedia works because people are willing to do substantial work for free for a non-profit organization. That doesn't work for a commercial business. You can get people to write about themselves (Myspace, Facebook, etc.) but beyond that, "crowdsourcing" doesn't go very far.

What do you envision an OS of the future doing?
Oh, I dunno, maybe some of the things that these research OSes do?

http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Software/Operating_Systems/Research/

"Nobody will need anything better than UNIX." is even dumber than "Nobody will need more than 640k."

Would this affect clause 4 of the ODP (DMoz) License (and similar copyright licenses)? Maybe that isn't considered a contract or only having to make "reasonable efforts" to check for changes is acceptable.

To let you know where I'm coming from in all of this, I'm a volunteer with Wikibooks, one of the sister projects to Wikipedia that is more involved with writing book-length content.

One of the problems we (as project participants) are currently facing is an overwhelming need to somehow index the content that is currently on the website. With over 26,000 pages of content currently, about the only way that you can find anything is to perform a google search. That has some value, but there are limits on even a Google search.

One of the sub-projects that I've been trying to work on over the past year or so is to try and organize the content into something perhaps some of the people visiting the website would be a little bit more familiar with: Card Catalog classification systems.

The best "source" of people who seem to have any skills in this area seems to be the Open Directory Project, but even then the number of people who have any real skills seems to be astonishingly low.

In trying to come up with a classification system of some kind to help organize the roughly 2000 e-book on Wikibooks, I've also been interviewing libraries and trying to find guides to classification that don't require paying expensive fees and can be used for new volunteers who want to help but aren't ready for a full-time job either. When I talk to professional librarians, what astounds me is not so much their confessions of a lack of knowledge about the topic, but the utter blank look on their faces when I try to explain the scope of what I'm doing. And it has so far proven to be far more complex than even what I thought it was going to be at the start.

Currently on Wikibooks, we are using a trio of the Dewey Decimal system, the LOC classification, and something "home grown" that we call bookshelves. Our catalog tends to be very tech-heavy in terms of the kinds of books we are dealing with (over 2 dozen books just about programming languages), but there is also some strength in linguistics as well. Some very surprising books have been written about learning some languages that would normally be considered obscure, and much better written than say a book about German. On the LOC top level, however, we have books in every classification letter except military and naval science, so there is some breadth to the topics covered as well.

As this is a volunteer effort, we have to use ressources available that are free (as in beer) to perform this effort. Even on this limited library of books, I have already come across severe limits to what we can do in terms of further refining some of the categories, as guidelines like the Dewey top 1000 topical summaries are already breaking down.

A project such as this open library project, dedicated to this kind of effort, is noble and something worthwhile but I also see some real practical problems once they move beyond just a few dozen books. It will be interesting to see how they solve some of those problems.... if they solve them at all. And this group seems to be operating in a bit of a vacuum here in terms of trying to reach out to other projects that may be doing the same sort of thing. That is always concerning when you think about supporting a crazy new project idea like this when it doesn't appear as though they have done their "homework".

Once I went here http://rdf.dmoz.org/rdf/
I downloaded the "rss-aol.rdf" file (it's huge).
I isolated the technology section.
Stripped it down to just it's links (http://blah.com/blah.rss).
Then I loaded them all in to my rss reader (~1000 or more 2003)
Then I finally decided that getting a story published on slashdot wasn't really that important.

Is such a thing even possible?

Not only poßible, ðere are several current examples, mostly as prototypes or wi some adaptation to market realities: Alphora Dataphor, MightyD, Rel, Opus, Duro.

I thought the number of pointers approached infinity as relationships increased

Ðere are no pointers in the relational model.

Sounds like they're reinventing Open Directory, which has been doing just fine for many years. I believe Google actually uses Open Directory as one of its seeds for the pagerank algorithm. The Wikimedia foundation keeps on starting up projects, many of which ever become very successful. Wikibooks, for instance, has never achieved its original, grandiose goals, and it's been struggling for years now without making much headway. Its only big area of success was gaming guides (not the college textbooks it was originaly supposed to create), but then they deleted all the gaming guides. I can count the high-quality, complete wikibooks on my thumbs. How about getting rid of some of the failed projects before proposing more?