PST Once derided as an amateur-produced directory, it's now on the verge of taking business from more established players. It's become popular enough to spawn a copycat, and rivals are beginning to attack both the editorial integrity and the reliability of the project. In the past year and a half, over 1.2 million sites in more than 190,000 categories have been compiled. Almost 20,000 people have signed up to surf the Web, write abstracts of sites and place them where they belong in the directory. Netscape has about 15 paid workers who also contribute to the site, but not full-time.
More sites are more issues, more dead links.
In a phone interview later, Deanna Sanford, Microsoft Network lead product manager, noted that she had discovered Open Directory editors promoting their own sites. Not just rivals gripe. Some users have complained as well. Tricia Francis, a quotation analyst for ABF Freight System Inc. of Fort Smith, Ark., told a panel of directory companies at the conference that ABF was the victim of a competitor's foul play in the Open Directory. A worker at a competing company became an editor and pigeonholed her firm in a city category rather than placing it in a more broad national category, she said.