On the absurdity of directories

Dave kvetches about the awkward (if not incorrect) taxonomy of aggregators on DMOZ. I think that Radio didn’t make the list because of the small type at the bottom of the page: “This category needs an editor.” This is probably also why RSS aggregators are buried under “Cataloging/Metadata/RDF/Applications/RSS.”

Two interesting points here:

  1. A directory, like any other catalogue, is a work of opinion and therefore inherently one-sided.
  2. You can’t really have a page without an editor and expect it to look good.

The thing about DMOZ, like MusicMoz, is that the choices of more than one editor are incorporated, and that becoming an editor is easy.
more…