| 10/20/03: |
 I think I'm going to have to do something radical to bootstrap the distributed directories idea.
Mon, Oct 20, 2003; by Dave Winer.
Dear friends..
The idea of decentralized and distributed Web directories has been at the top of my to-do list for several years.
I have gotten nowhere with it, so far, but I am absolutely sure it's the biggest thing to come along since the Web itself. Bigger than weblogs, bigger than RSS, bigger than search engines, bigger than SOAP and XML-RPC.
I stake my reputation on this. I've been having so much trouble explaining it. But when people get it, they end up agreeing with me.
Today a perfect use-case showed up. I was reading a tutorial for starting a weblog and they pointed to Google's directory (actually a repurposed DMOZ) of weblog tools. I was appalled to see that neither of my tools were on the list. How could that happen? It's because DMOZ is a centralized directory. One person has exclusive authority over a domain of knowledge. Here's the bug, no one is so wise to be the exclusive authority over any domain of knowledge, no matter how small, no matter how smart the person. You always need a second or third (or 18th or 281st) source.
A search engine would never make that mistake, it can't have the kinds of selfish biases a human being has. It reflects the average of what everyone thinks and therefore has the property of the Internet itself, it routes around outages. The way Internet directories are done today, emphatically, is not like this. They create outages that we must route around.
I know how to do the decentralized directories. It's not hard. In fact its beauty is that it is so simple there's almost nothing to it. It's why it's so confusing. Basically, we just have to decide to do it.
I wrote up a hype-free recipe for this, here.
http://scriptingnews.userland.com/2003/10/20#howToDecentralizeDirectories
This why I came to a university -- because here we have people who love knowledge for its own sake. This kind of project can't make money. But it can revolutionize knowledge. Please help, let's start a new kind of directory.
So the idea of the Salon MetaDirectories would be similiar to this, and I have started the WIFLblog directory at:
http://blogs.salon.com/0001455/stories/2003/11/01/wiflblogLinks.html
So come on all you Salon and Userland bloggers let's share the links, and create collective knowledge on all kinds of topics!!
Since I posted this I found this article of Roger Cadenhead on Scripting News:
| Creating DMOZ-style directories in RU |
topic started 11/30/2000; 10:12:26 AM
last post 11/30/2000; 2:45:18 PM | |
 Rogers Cadenhead - Creating DMOZ-style directories in RU 
11/30/2000; 10:12:26 AM (reads: 668, responses: 2) |
| I'm in the process of importing directories I have created on the Open Directory Project into RU. Since the ODP has a license that allows anyone to publish its content as long as some boilerplate HTML is included along with it, porting ODP data seems like a good opportunity for RU.
Right now, there are two features I would like to see:
1) Link descriptions. All links have a title (which is hyperlinked to a URL) and a description (which is not hyperlinked).
2) "Cool Site" designation. In ODP, an editor can designate one or two links as the best in their category, and they are listed first above the other links. An ODP page that includes one.
Also, the entire ODP directory is available as an RDF dump. The files are implemented in XML, though they don't claim that it is "legal XML." It should be possible to convert that file into an HTML directory OPML file (or a series of files), though of course I say that as someone who doesn't know enough about Frontier yet to try that task myself.
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Dave Winer - Re: Creating DMOZ-style directories in RU
11/30/2000; 10:20:34 AM (reads: 771, responses: 0) |
| Rogers, I can't tell you how much this pleases me!
I'm going to give all your suggestions consideration today, and see if I can't get them implemented. This is very exciting. I'll help any way I can.
BTW, I have a DaveNet piece in the pipe on Bootstrapping. This is a first-class bootstrap.
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