Well folks it sems like DMOZ has gone forever! A post on Rich Skrentas blog (founder of DMOZ) says

Apparently the machine holding dmoz in AOL ops crashed. Standard backups had been discontinued for some reason; during unsuccessful attempts to restore some of the lost data, ops blew away the rest of the existing data on the system.

So for the past 6 weeks, a few folks have been trying to patch the system back together again (reverse engineering from the latest RDF dump, I suppose). But 6 weeks is a very long outage. Add in the massive AOL layoffs last week, and it’s not clear if there’s even any left over there who cares. Even if some form of the ODP editing system is brought back, the likelihood of continued existence within AOL seems extremely doubtful.

dmoz doesn’t exactly operate on a model of transparency, to say the least, so they have been keeping the details of what happened private. Perhaps they’re concerned about an exodus of the remaining editors, or gleeful proclamations of death from the SEM industry. The remaining ODP editors will probably be mad at me for discussing this, but they get mad at me whenever I talk about the ODP….ironic! :-) Hey guys, it’s 2006, open up.

read more at his blog…

Danny Sullivan yesterday wrote his final post on Search engine watch. It is of course his goodbye speach, but it was not goodbye and thanks for all the fish, indeed it was upbeat, and is a tribute the professionalism that Danny has.

read it here

Danny’s goodbye speech

Danny Sullivan yesterday wrote his final post on Search engine watch. It is of course his goodbye speach, but it was not goodbye and thanks for all the fish, indeed it was upbeat, and is a tribute the professionalism that Danny has.

read it here

Danny’s goodbye speech