“Quite some time ago, PCPs such as Rolling Stone Magazine and (surprise!) America Online approached the top management at ODP and suggested that it would be a good deal all around if the PCPs could manage their own site listings within ODP. After all, many ODP editors were also Web site owners who managed their own listings. The difference was that the ODP editors had to work their way up through the ranks whereas PCPs were given the proverbial key to the Emerald City from day one. To add fuel to the fire, many trustworthy volunteer editors were “counseled” for deleting or modifying inappropriate listings that had been added to ODP by PCP editors.”

“Lack of representativeness and lack of transparency. Unlike the federal bureaucracy in a democratic nation, you don’t precisely know what the criteria for acceptance are. Criteria for progress through the ranks is similarly unknown. The Open Directory’s procedures for accepting new editors or accepting site submissions are no more open or transparent than they are at private companies like Yahoo or Looksmart.

Incentive for corruption and excessive categorization of low-quality sites.Yahoo and Looksmart (presumably “closed shops”) have employees performing similar functions to the Open Directory Category Editors. Think about this. Looking at it from the point of view of organizational sociology (yes, I must), the underlying reality is that these three are all organizations with rules and structures whose main output is the opinionated categorization, and importantly, rejection, of a vast number of submissions of web sites and Internet content. The key difference seems to be that dmoz category editors aren’t paid. What is the likely result of this? Think about the analogy of a country whose bureaucrats are poorly compensated. Any textbook can give you examples. All moralizing aside, extremely low pay creates an
incentive for the postal inspector or the traffic cop to engage in petty forms of corruption. What’s my city health inspector’s incentive to REALLY crack down on all the bug-infested restaurants downtown? And what might motivate a dmoz category editor to prevent their buddies’ lower quality sites from getting one or even several listings? And are they likely to think about the whole mess all fits together, or is that someone else’s problem? In fact, there are considerable incentives in volunteer directories to pump up one’s numbers of site submissions, since that is the key criterion for advancement through the ranks. The web’s best resources, therefore, are impossible to find, buried under a mountain of minutiae.

The “open” directory is owned by a $300 billion company. Most importantly — and I hate to bring this to the attention of the self-governing republic of dmoz — the relatively benevolent overseer of its operations, Netscape, was acquired by AOL, which recently merged with Time Warner, creating a $300 billion behemoth. To repeat: the Open Directory Project is owned by AOL Time Warner. The “project” now has marketing executives assigned to it, though you won’t see that openly admitted on the “About us” page. AOL Time Warner: a bastion of openness? Quite the opposite. AOL loves to be proprietary. It dislikes the “open” Internet, but just now it probably wants as much PR as it can get which juxtaposes the word “open” with “AOL.” This could help a lot in smoothing things by the regulators. Fair enough. But when that’s all done with, AOL, how about some truth in advertising?”

“…criticisms fall into at least five categories:

WAP is designed to further the economic interests of the cellular carriers, the handset manufacturers, and sellers of WAP gateways.

The developers of WAP and WML, Phone.com and the WAP Forum, failed to use the collaborative process within the W3C and rushed ahead on their own agenda.

The protocol is flexible enough to allow different implementations on different handsets and browser clients, meaning a dramatic increase in the number of interfaces that web developers will have to design for and serve to.

It is only a temporary fix, a stop-gap measure for the few years until more processing power and wider bandwidth (G3 networks).

An incompatibility between wireless and Net security protocols exposes encrypted transactions in the middle of their journey, making the system risky for secure transactions like bill paying or banking.”

“Mobile data is a compelling concept. The idea of being cut free from wires and being able to access information in various shapes and forms is hugely attractive. Being able to make use of the mobile phone
companys’ billing systems to allow for online purchasing is an awesome opportunity. There can be hardly any doubt that somehow, somewhere, somebody will figure out how to do it right, but on the evidence to date, WAP/WML is not the answer. Let’s hope that after this poor start the industry will get its act together better and start thinking from the consumers’ point of view, not its own.”

“Some 86.5 percent of respondents said that WAP services were too slow, while 85.5 percent complained about the price. There are too few services to make WAP attractive, according to 83.3
percent of those surveyed.”

“Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal Europe had a fascinating piece on the strategy telecoms companies are following with WAP. They are “locking” their phones so that you can only access their portal, or even in some cases only access sites that have agreements with them. Have these people learned nothing from the Web?

Fortunately, mobile Internet company Wappup took France Telecom to court on this issue. The French courts ruled yesterday that France Telecom would have to unlock its phones — but only at users’ request! (Incidentally, it doesn’t look like Wappup understands the Web either — access to anything but the home page of their site, which is not very informative, requires a username and password. They do, however, have a link to the text of the French court decision, in French, bien sur.)

There are a number of issues here. First, trying to partition the Web is wrong and futile. As Dave Winer points out in Scripting News, if you aren’t getting the whole Web, you’re not getting the Web. Second, trying to confine users to a preplanned network not only loses the richness of the Web, it will terminally frustrate many users. If you’ve ever tried a WAP phone, the interface is already a huge constraint. The telecom giants may — with their misguided portal strategy — have found a way to kill WAP off once and for all.

Given the huge sums telecom groups are spending on the promised land of third-generation mobile services, they can perhaps leap over the constraints of WAP.”

“Total Recall works by tracking your browsing session in a file saved on your local hard drive. When you restart Mozilla after a browser crash (or even an operating system crash), the windows that were open before the crash will be displayed to you in a pulldown menu that will allow you to return to one or all of the pages you were viewing.”

“A generation ago the kind of students who entered science fairs were considered nerds — preternaturally bright kids whose ardent intellects, moire-patterned wardrobes and clueless social instincts put them outside the adolescent mainstream. Geeks still roam the halls of American high schools — and of Midwood, for that matter — but many of Midwood’s Intel kids move comfortably in the newly respectable mainstream, where being scientifically astute has a certain cachet. They inhabit an area of cultural endeavor that — coming a quarter-century after the birth of biotechnology and personal computers and, yes, the rise of Nasdaq — is now seen not only as intellectually precocious but also, suddenly, improbably, as positioned in a fast lane pointed toward wealth, creature comforts and the freedom to choose what to make of one’s life. ”

“The key to interacting with your geek is to learn to speak his or her language, she explains — defining personal improvements as “upgrades” and bad habits as “nonproductive feedback loops.” It’s simply a matter of using the right encouragement. Don’t tell him he needs to get some exercise and lose some weight; tell him that he will be better prepared for all-night Doom marathons if he is in better physical shape. It’s all about becoming more “efficient.””

“…many musicians have discovered, as the Grateful Dead did, that the best way to make money from music is to give it away. While scarcity may increase the value of physical goods, such as CD’s, the opposite applies to information. In a dematerialized information economy, there is an equally strong relationship between familiarity and value. If your work is good, allowing what you’ve done to self-replicate freely increases demand for what you haven’t done yet, whether by live performances or by charging online for the download of new work.

For these, and far more reasons than I can state here, I’m convinced that the traditional music business is finished. Napster and other environments like it will polish off the likes of BMG and Tower Records within five years.”