DMOZ may finally be dead, according to an early founder. It comes as no suprise to anyone who has had to deal with the behemoth. Now the old dinosaur is down, and nearly out. Let’s face fact, it’s a different web than it used to be, and the only thing AOL is commited to doing is losing.

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.

Wow, they pretty much lost all of the data. All of that incredible work done over the years by their band of corrupt editors may come for naught in the final analysis. But what of all the DMOZ clones, where will they get data from now? Nowhere, it appears. Bye Dmoz.