This looks like a really cool project, excited to browse through over the holiday break. Just submitted my art blog (https://freezine.xyz), but realized I don't publish an RSS feed. Will have to address and resubmit.
Why, oh why....?
Stuck in hospital, so much free time free, so many restrictions, and yet so few - what am i missing, or likely to have missed, being on mobile?
Sorry to hear you're in hospital, I hope you get well soon. The warning is there because I don't design the site for mobile, plus there is content hidden around the site that is easiest to find by viewing source or otherwise exploring in a way that mobile browsers don't make easy.
I don't think it's that simple. It was useful then because web discoverability was an unsolved problem, and web content was tiny compared to today. A directory sort of fit the need. As the web grew directories became bloated and hard to navigate, search became
more useful.
This is more of a nostalgia or niche link list. It's not the same purpose as yahoo in the 90s.
I think that search engines like Google are unbeatable to find content that we already know about. On the other hand, those lists are great to discover what we don't already know about, such as new topics, etc. Just like the awesome lists on GitHub.
My thought exactly, and also why I don't just search 'latest news' on Google every morning. Human curation is a thing. (not sure how much human curation goes into ooh.directory, but I'm pretty sure they don't use Google's ranking algorithms to surface links)
DMOZ was and is freely licensed though. This one makes for a nice proof of concept, but there's no mention of availability or reusability for any of this data.
A nice addition would be having account, and being able to like it. Likes are not public, but instead combine to show you things other people liked as well. Since they are not public, hopefully that will discourage gaming it.
An error occurred during a connection to ooh.directory. PR_END_OF_FILE_ERROR
The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because the authenticity of the received data could not be verified.
Please contact the web site owners to inform them of this problem.
But all kidding aside, web directories should be much more powerful now than in the 90s. Websites have RSS, and directory websites should be able to automatically monitor things like uptime, and leverage RSS to preview a site's most recent post.
I've considered maintaining my own directory on my personal website (a one-way webring if you will), but always stopped because the sites I linked to either died, or were acquired and became something very different.
Regarding the lifetime of a site, it might be possible to submit requests to the Internet Archive or similar service whenever a site is added to a directory or a new post is found on it. That way too, it would be easier to see when a site is no longer active or when it turned into something else. Then, when it's deactivated, the web directory could just point to the archive first
I prefer Mark Twain's “History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme.”
It's pretty obvious that we have come to a stagnant period of online content and there's a desire to move past the glamour of the Instagram and political fights on Twitter and optimised for ad revenue videos on Youtube but I don't think that the personal websites are coming back.
Those were cool because only specific type of people were able to build websites, then the code free services for sharing content came along and everybody got online presence but because the medium is the message we are kind of getting tired of the message. There seems to be a search for a new medium. The time for the next verse feels around the corner but I don't think we have found it just yet!
It might just be observation bias but it seems to me that personal websites and blogs are coming back at least for the kinds of people that might have had one in the old web. Perhaps the trend won't wash over the whole web but having a subculture that is at least as large as the old web would be great, no?
I wonder how soon people will start to collaboratively train ML models for curation, by their acts if curation, much like spam filters are trained today.
This gave me a flashback to the final season of "Halt and Catch Fire", which I enjoyed a lot and recommend to anyone who has nostalgic feelings about computing and the internet in the 90s.
- Newsletters aren't included. Some sites are a blog and a newsletter, with identical content, but only those which mainly seem like a blog are included.
- Only blogs updated within the past year or so are added.
- Tumblrs are only included if they’re either focused on a specific topic or feature original content.
- Link blogs are only included if they include original commentary about each link.
- No blogs promoting hate speech, denial of climate change, anti-vax ideas, etc.
> - No blogs promoting hate speech, denial of climate change, anti-vax ideas, etc.
I've heard of Twitter accounts getting banned because they mentioned some of these subjects in context of criticizing them. (which is the opposite result that would be expected)
How their curation process work is just as important as the rules themselves. If it's transparent and there's a person (not just an automated algorithm), is there also a recourse process for false positives or bad decision making?
My personal opinion is that Phil is a busy guy and doesn't have time to carefully analyze your request with any nuance.
Here's an example of the difficulty.
"Phil, can you review the article [link to blog] where you banned us from? We are critically analyzing a very socially sensitive topic and while we are disagreeing with the majority of people, we actually encouraging unity and are not encouraging any hate. You can clearly see if you read our entire article."
Or, "I only linked to Trump's tirade to point out how insane it is. Can you re-read my article....?"
> I've heard of Twitter accounts getting banned because they mentioned some of these subjects in context of criticizing them. (which is the opposite result that would be expected)
My comment above is the very reason for this discussion. Not using the site is the same as suggesting not commenting here, which is nearly nonsensical.
176 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 177 ms ] threadWhy, oh why....? Stuck in hospital, so much free time free, so many restrictions, and yet so few - what am i missing, or likely to have missed, being on mobile?
Ever considered to publish this list as an easily searchable and exportable OPML file?
This is more of a nostalgia or niche link list. It's not the same purpose as yahoo in the 90s.
My thought exactly, and also why I don't just search 'latest news' on Google every morning. Human curation is a thing. (not sure how much human curation goes into ooh.directory, but I'm pretty sure they don't use Google's ranking algorithms to surface links)
* or "surfing the net", if you're old enough.
What are these lists you're talking about? Could you give an example?
But well... the problem is almost the same: too few info == too much info => No enough info to make decisions.
Yahoo is how baby me learned the word 'hierarchical'.
The youngest Millennial is 26, so they probably knew at least a little when they were young about what Yahoo was.
Ohh.nostalgia
http://www.odp.org/homepage.php (archive)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Directory_License
https://web.archive.org/web/20070813215202/http://www.dmoz.o...
"The Free Software Foundation describes the ODL as a non-free license"
But your point is a good one and well taken.
https://curlie.org/
https://mastodon.social/@philgyford/109393682988861819
This one has categories and filtering options, nice! Random is good to have (see also https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random)
Curation, combined with good categorization, is sorely needed in today's internet.
The solution of "search" (aka Google) just doesn't cut it if you want to discover the best publications in a topic area.
I hope this project takes off!
A nice addition would be having account, and being able to like it. Likes are not public, but instead combine to show you things other people liked as well. Since they are not public, hopefully that will discourage gaming it.
Remind me of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMOZ
(It's my site.)
Secure Connection Failed
An error occurred during a connection to ooh.directory. PR_END_OF_FILE_ERROR
This site can’t be reached
But all kidding aside, web directories should be much more powerful now than in the 90s. Websites have RSS, and directory websites should be able to automatically monitor things like uptime, and leverage RSS to preview a site's most recent post.
I've considered maintaining my own directory on my personal website (a one-way webring if you will), but always stopped because the sites I linked to either died, or were acquired and became something very different.
I prefer Mark Twain's “History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme.”
It's pretty obvious that we have come to a stagnant period of online content and there's a desire to move past the glamour of the Instagram and political fights on Twitter and optimised for ad revenue videos on Youtube but I don't think that the personal websites are coming back.
Those were cool because only specific type of people were able to build websites, then the code free services for sharing content came along and everybody got online presence but because the medium is the message we are kind of getting tired of the message. There seems to be a search for a new medium. The time for the next verse feels around the corner but I don't think we have found it just yet!
That has its own history
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/01/12/history-rhymes/
https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/karl_marx_382655
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eighteenth_Brumaire_of_L...
So really it was Engels.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler%27s_law_of_eponymy
I wonder how soon people will start to collaboratively train ML models for curation, by their acts if curation, much like spam filters are trained today.
I am just sad that my very unfocused blog doesn't really fit into any of their categories.
Nonetheless, this is a really cool project!
> Some blogs appear in two or, occasionally, three categories. If it would take more than that, it ends up in the wonderland of Uncategorizable.
Since there's no way to select multiple categories in the "suggest" form, I take it you will manually amend the entry.
https://ooh.directory/about/
- Every blog must have an RSS or Atom feed.
- Newsletters aren't included. Some sites are a blog and a newsletter, with identical content, but only those which mainly seem like a blog are included.
- Only blogs updated within the past year or so are added.
- Tumblrs are only included if they’re either focused on a specific topic or feature original content.
- Link blogs are only included if they include original commentary about each link.
- No blogs promoting hate speech, denial of climate change, anti-vax ideas, etc.
I've heard of Twitter accounts getting banned because they mentioned some of these subjects in context of criticizing them. (which is the opposite result that would be expected)
How their curation process work is just as important as the rules themselves. If it's transparent and there's a person (not just an automated algorithm), is there also a recourse process for false positives or bad decision making?
(the key part of my concern)
Here's an example of the difficulty.
"Phil, can you review the article [link to blog] where you banned us from? We are critically analyzing a very socially sensitive topic and while we are disagreeing with the majority of people, we actually encouraging unity and are not encouraging any hate. You can clearly see if you read our entire article."
Or, "I only linked to Trump's tirade to point out how insane it is. Can you re-read my article....?"
My comment above is the very reason for this discussion. Not using the site is the same as suggesting not commenting here, which is nearly nonsensical.
Can we have this for the entire Internet, please? Thanks.