What?

“The past of DMOZ is full of myths, legends, drama, trauma, successes and failures, all of which help shape its future as social media's Grand Dame.”

Grand Dame? He's like Joan Crawford in Sunset Blvd. Living in a fantasy world...

I appreciate ODP's place in the history of the web, but it is somewhat sad to see how AOL's strategic blunders in running it has resulted in its substantial decline in importance. They allowed the volunteer editors to develop an inward-focused (paranoid?) organizational culture and refused to take on enough new editors to keep the directory big and fresh enough to be a meaningful representation of the web. And I don't say this as someone who wants ODP to become more commercial. For all I care, they can delete entire categories of commercial sites. In fact, they would probably be better off doing so as it would free up resources for the rest of the directory and reduce the tendency of their editors to adopt the moral-person-in-an-immoral world posture we see all too often.

The history of the web is clear: openness wins; exclusivity loses. Sites and web businesses/nonprofits that embrace openness succeed (e.g. Wikipedia) while places that turn inward, like ODP, become less relevant.

In keeping with the successes of the past 10 years, the future of DMOZ is as an information provider rather than a destination site. We will be enhancing to service to become more of a 21st century web service and simplify the integration of DMOZ data in other resources and applications, by creating "mashups". For example if you maintain an informational site about gardening, you can use DMOZ to get you a list of hand-picked gardening sites to point your readers too, or if you are a hockey fan you can make a little widget on your blog to show hockey clubs in your local region.