Barn-raisings are a relic of times gone by, when a community would come together to help one of its own. Barn-raisings were about voluntarism and cooperation.
People are constantly raising virtual barns on the Internet. Much of the software controlling the Net’s basic functions, for example, was created by teams of volunteers. They came together in cyberspace and they worked at different times, but their goals were akin to the barn-builders of yore: to help the community and, by extension, themselves.
One of the most intriguing Net ventures isn’t about software, per se. This one is about sharing information in the purest sense: a directory of World Wide Web sites, created by volunteers, that is beginning to achieve critical mass.
It’s called the “Open Directory Project” (directory.mozilla.org), and it looks a lot like the category leader, Yahoo!. The hierarchy of listings is similar, following the eminently sensible approach that Yahoo’s founders dreamed up when they began their Web catalog.
The Open Directory is especially fascinating because it is now part of a for-profit company, Netscape Communications Corp.
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The Open Directory people believe their advantage is simple: A brigade of paid generalists is ultimately no match for an army of passionate volunteers. Today’s Open Directory consists of almost 7,000 people who are managing more than 43,000 categories that point to 337,000 Web pages and sites–all accomplished in the past eight months.
The Open Directory isn’t the only service that relies on editors who spend lots of time on specific topics. The Mining Company (www.miningco.com), a New York-based operation, has about 500 paid guides on various topics. It’s not as broad as the competition, but if the category is there you’ll find useful links.
For many purposes, moreover, I still tend to gravitate toward Yahoo (www.yahoo.com), which has more than a million listings in its directory but won’t say how many people work on them (total Yahoo employment is under 900). Yahoo, dating back to the ancient Internet times of 1994, is clearly deeper in certain categories that many people find essential, such as company listings and finance.
But I’m impressed with the quality of the listings in the Open Directory, which was known as “NewHoo” before being sold to Netscape. If the project can maintain its momentum in attracting new volunteers, and so far it has done just that, it will become one of the places people go when they start looking for something.
I have especially high hopes for the Open Directory’s potential to archive links for more arcane topics. Someone, somewhere is fanatical about almost any obscure topic, and is collecting a comprehensive set of Web links on that subject. The Open Directory could be a great outlet for such a person’s collection. No commercial directory, no matter how large its staff, will compete.
Netscape is incorporating NewHoo (I still love that name, even if it is corny) into its own top-level portal site, which in turn was a major lure for America Online Inc. when it agreed to buy Netscape late last year. The Open Directory will replace the directory from Excite, which has agreed to be bought by @Home, the cable-TV Web access company and Internet service provider.
So why should volunteers keep working hard for a company that’s going to convert their mental sweat into money? For one thing, they previously worked hard for entrepreneurs who surely had at least some goals beyond pure service to humanity. (Terms of the Netscape-NewHoo deal haven’t been disclosed.)
More to the point, the volunteers are contributing to a project that has value to the Net community far beyond Netscape’s portal plans–a value stemming from Netscape’s support for some kinds of openness. A year ago, the company turned its browser programming code over to the worldwide user community, putting it into the so-called “open-source” model that has gained such strength recently. The Open Directory, in fact, lives on the Netscape-supported Web site (www.mozilla.org) from which the open-source browser development is being managed.
Even more striking is Netscape’s laudable decision to open the directory in the most profound way: by giving it to anyone who wants it–free for the download. If you want to create your own directory site using the data and then sell advertising, go for it.
Netscape’s license agreement asks little in return: “The only requirement is that you put up a link to tell people how to contribute” to the directory, says Rich Skrenta, NewHoo’s co-founder and CEO, now the directory’s technical leader at Netscape.