Is Yahoo! still useful?

[Louis Rosenfeld]

On Tue, 18 Nov 1997, CMUNSON wrote:

>      I'm looking forward to more responses, but does this indicate that 
>      there may finally be a need to have a comprehensive subject guide 
>      coordinated by librarians?
>      
>      Are there any promising projects out there?
>      
>      Chuck

Depends on how you define promising. ;-) 

I'll nominate the Argus Clearinghouse (http://www.clearinghouse.net) for
purely selfish reasons.  We've tried to focus on a valuable niche (topical
guides to Internet resources), centralize what seems to make sense to
centralize (classification and rating of guides), and decentralize the
rest (creation and maintenance of guides by independent authors).  The
part we've never achieved is a sound economic model; The Mining Company
succeeded in getting the capital to do the things we'd hoped to, but the
jury is still out on their financial success. 

Louis Rosenfeld                                             lou at argus-inc.com
Argus Associates, Inc.                                   http://argus-inc.com
109 Catherine Street                                   voice: +1.313.913.0010
Ann Arbor, MI  48104  USA                                fax: +1.313.213.8082

Information Architecture for the World Wide Web  (L. Rosenfeld & P. Morville)
O'Reilly & Associates; Jan 1998.      http://www.ora.com/catalog/infotecture/