Thread: Is DMOZ dead?
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Old 19-12-2006, 04:32 PM   #1 (permalink)
Brian Turner
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Default Is DMOZ dead?

I posted before on Platinax News that there were technical issues with DMOZ.

Now DMOZ founder Rich Skrenta has joined in to announce DMOZ is dead.

According to his comments:

Quote:
Apparently the machine holding dmoz in AOL ops crashed. Standard backups had been discontinued for some reason; during unsuccessful attempts to restore some of the lost data, ops blew away the rest of the existing data on the system.

So for the past 6 weeks, a few folks have been trying to patch the system back together again (reverse engineering from the latest RDF dump, I suppose). But 6 weeks is a very long outage. Add in the massive AOL layoffs last week, and it's not clear if there's even any left over there who cares. Even if some form of the ODP editing system is brought back, the likelihood of continued existence within AOL seems extremely doubtful.
Question is, if DMOZ is dead as a system, what sort of loss will that be to the internet?

Conversely, if DMOZ comes back properly online, does it still have a role to play in today's internet?
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