Given how worried everyone is about the AI slopocalypse where the internet is drowned in LLM-generated junk content maybe it's time for a resurgence of human curated directories like this one.
There is no ai in the content, in fact it's probably the best finance blog in Europe - the ai likely used it to be trained on. Cover images probably yes but they use their own characters. Anyways, cover images are not what you're there for. Content is absolutely top notch.
Some suggestions: I know none of us like "the algorithms choosing", but I think we can do better than alphabetical order. Number of clicks you see (popularity), or number of inbound links google tells you about would be good.
I also think you've gone to great effort, but it's still very light in some categories. I hope you keep going - what's your data source? Are you tracking outbound links from the ones you have indexed to find new blogs?
Syndic8, DMOZ, NewsIsFree, and TX (lost to history?) used the same taxonomy approach seen on ooh.directory. All are defunct now, but DMOZ appears to live on as curlie.
Technically, we could tag our RSS feeds with the taxonomy defined by ooh.dir, which would allow us to automatically sort blogs into topic groups, but I haven't found a single feed that uses the approach. We end up with ad-hoc category labels that are challenging to deduplicate, or more often, uncategorized blogs.
The problem with https://ooh.directory/ is that nobody can tell what gets added and what doesn't. Submissions go through an opaque review process and a lot of good submissions don't make it.
Just try searching your favorite bloggers in ooh.directory. 9 out of 10 times they'll be missing from the directory.
I'd prefer a more transparent directory where we can can tell why something is or isn't added.
From what I have seen over the years, the problem with such aggregation sites has been that the maintainer eventually loses interest or does not renew the domain etc.
The only way to maintain long term interest in such sites would be to have it as a github site/or a long term commitment, community contributions with some kind of community filtering/voting to maintain the quality of submissions.
I am pretty happy with https://marginalia-search.com/. It's kind of my secondary search engine at this point.
I can always search for anything and find indie websites writing about the topic.
It also helps with the dread of not having to add my personal site to yet another blog curation site which I don't know will:
1. Be maintained in the longer term.
2. Would be willing to add my site to the curation site.
I'm not sure about the orange on dark green colour scheme, but I like that the site is responsive and light-weight, and manages to show a bunch of fancy effects in pure CSS.
I was surprised that Simon Willison's blog is listed in Python and Web Development categories, but not AI.
Please considered sorting websites by last updated date by default, instead of alphabetical which is a pretty useless method of presentation. It works better for books and static pages, not dynamic internet content.
ooh this reminds me of the old internet. Altavista, Yahoo, etc. all had lists like this!
It's fun to click about and go down the rabbit hole of things I might not normally see in my daily routine which is now mostly about avoiding the hellscape of the modern internet.
Does the name ooh has anything to do with Yahoo. Because that was what reminded me of, but I cant find anything about naming info on the site. So just wondering.
There are lot of internet article farming, but the real internet is increasingly "small". So I am not surprised we are back to where we started again; Directory.
45 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 65.3 ms ] threadOK then.
https://www.bankeronwheels.com/
Some suggestions: I know none of us like "the algorithms choosing", but I think we can do better than alphabetical order. Number of clicks you see (popularity), or number of inbound links google tells you about would be good.
I also think you've gone to great effort, but it's still very light in some categories. I hope you keep going - what's your data source? Are you tracking outbound links from the ones you have indexed to find new blogs?
Granted, I'd love a more technical version. Perhaps anyone here could start one?
Make an RSS list, pick the ones out you liked and BAM, you got my sub :)
https://alexsci.com/blog/rss-categories/
Syndic8, DMOZ, NewsIsFree, and TX (lost to history?) used the same taxonomy approach seen on ooh.directory. All are defunct now, but DMOZ appears to live on as curlie.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_directories
Technically, we could tag our RSS feeds with the taxonomy defined by ooh.dir, which would allow us to automatically sort blogs into topic groups, but I haven't found a single feed that uses the approach. We end up with ad-hoc category labels that are challenging to deduplicate, or more often, uncategorized blogs.
Just try searching your favorite bloggers in ooh.directory. 9 out of 10 times they'll be missing from the directory.
I'd prefer a more transparent directory where we can can tell why something is or isn't added.
The fact that it’s not exhaustive and is a reflection of the creator’s taste is a feature, not a bug.
You can submit a blog here: https://minifeed.net/suggest
Criteria is pretty simple:
- Must be written by a human.
- Must be in English (for now).
- Must have a valid RSS feed.
- Must not be purely a "micro-blog", i.e. must have some content other than tweet-sized status updates or links.
The only way to maintain long term interest in such sites would be to have it as a github site/or a long term commitment, community contributions with some kind of community filtering/voting to maintain the quality of submissions.
It also helps with the dread of not having to add my personal site to yet another blog curation site which I don't know will:
1. Be maintained in the longer term.
2. Would be willing to add my site to the curation site.
https://kagi.com/smallweb
This did give it a new dimension.
Each has its own RSS feed too as well.
I was surprised that Simon Willison's blog is listed in Python and Web Development categories, but not AI.
It's fun to click about and go down the rabbit hole of things I might not normally see in my daily routine which is now mostly about avoiding the hellscape of the modern internet.
https://hnpwd.github.io/
https://rednafi.com/blogroll/
There are lot of internet article farming, but the real internet is increasingly "small". So I am not surprised we are back to where we started again; Directory.