From: Karl Anderson (kra@monkey.org)
Date: Wed Oct 11 2000 - 11:41:51 PDT
bleah, these articles are so easy to write, it's no wonder the world
is full of them. Finding complaints about a system is dead simple,
because people love to complain. Hey, it's like having an army of
volunteer researchers!
But among all the whining, the author never tied in the open source 24
karat turd - before DMOZ was NewHoo, it was GnuHoo, until the
slashdotters found out & attacked it (bombed the database and Rich
Skrenta's mailbox, etc.) for perverting the Gnu name with a
closed source site. Bzzt, if you can't even find flamers at
Slashdot, you're hopeless.
Look at the XODP egroup posting volume, & you'll see why finding
complaints is easy, finding solutions is hard:
Message archive by month:
May Jun Jul Aug Sep (half of)Oct
10 104 364 63 31 1
That's not meant as a flame towards the XODP participants, I'd expect
that for any group based on disgruntled refugees. Nobody promised me
that XODP would save the world, so I don't fault them for seemingly
not having much longrunning discussion.
Coming up with an article that discusses *why* this system has these
problem, now, that might take some work. That's probably why that
first article doesn't quite mention that for all it's problems, DMOZ
is the best general directory out there. Why isn't there something
better? Is it the hierarchical volunteer system itself, or is that
fixable? Fixable with some compensated top dogs, or with a public
moderation system?
I believe most everything that these articles say, and they're worth
reading, but ... I don't know, I guess I should stop complaining about
something that will be with us for as long as we have journalists
(which will be for as long as we can talk or read). Or maybe I should
get a writing job. "This just in! Slashdot's S/N ratio sucks!" Nah,
I'll just submit this post, it's already written.
-- Karl Anderson kra@monkey.org http://www.monkey.org/~kra/
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