In reply to: Catalog of Internet Artist Clubs
Kicks! Great find. That is one of the best done websites I’ve seen in a long time. I love the timeline bar graphs.
I’m beginning to think that the failure of early directories was that they were just piles of links with no sense of an editor or curator.This got me thinking. There was/is another directory model that I don’t think we have discussed much: the expert guide model. When I first got on the Web I ran across The Mining Company which later became About.com. A similar one was Suite101.
The Mining Co. was fantastic, but when they ditched the unpopular topics and became About.com they were not as good. Still About was decent for awhile.
Anyway the model was each topic or subtopic had an expert guide they would write lots of different essays on their topic, link them all together, and at the bottom of each essay was a list of links to resources and other expert pages on the subject.
This was a sort of hybrid: not just a collection of links but not a wiki either. The bottleneck was finding experts and keeping them. Wiki’s were developed partly in response to this bottleneck.
These sites were excellent starting points when you knew absolutely nothing about a topic but needed to learn.
