Bomis Options

[Peter Damian]

I'm struggling to find any information on this one. Did Jimmy set it up in 1996, 1998, or 2000? Where did he get the money to set it up? Why were the servers in a shack in Tampa, Florida, when the main office was in San Diego? When did Jimmy move to San Diego?

Wikipedia, as always when it comes to such matters, is reticent.

[Peter Damian]

Can someone translate the above posts (ODP - what that?) into ordinary language?

One of my intentions in the book will be to bring some of these techie ideas in plain language to a general audience.

What exactly is a 'web ring' for? What does it look like? How would I use it? (Sorry to be so curmudgeonly - I'm from the generation that used rotary dial phones, indeed I am looking at a nice ebonite one on my desk as I type this).

E

[EricBarbour]

Can someone translate the above posts (ODP - what that?) into ordinary language?

Open Directory Project. Still available at dmoz.org. Just another of those "free" projects of the early web that eventually became a "drifting ship"--because the contributors bickered constantly.

Take a close look at the ODP. Despite being very different from Wikipedia, it is run in a similar free-culture-nerd manner. And has lost its contributor base, and become a superfluous project. Most of its database is hopelessly out of date and will apparently never be improved, whilst the few remaining contributors create links only about their own narrow interests. Wikipedia's likely future.

(You will also see their discussion forum. A forum which is completely inaccessible to outsiders and new users.)

One of my intentions in the book will be to bring some of these techie ideas in plain language to a general audience.

I think it is impossible to write such a book without some kind of glossary of the arcane tech and WP terminology. However, it should not be difficult to devise one. Just a question of how much detail to go into.