about

The idea

The idea behind wectar is the fusion of two worlds, dmoz.org (open directory project) and del.icio.us. It is our believe that a combination of these two great ways of organizing web sites can prove interesting while also promoting both web services.

How do we prepare the wectarian soup out of these two rich ingredients? Just check it out, wectar is ready for you. And don't forget to expect a link behind nearly every information displayed.

How it works

Wectar retrieves its dmoz information from the dmoz rdf dump. By that it doesn't generates traffic on the dmoz page itself through using life data. This strategy might has the drawback of the need to update the database regularly and not being always top up to date, but seems to be the more appropriate setup for a web directory aspiring to be more than just another dmoz mirror and most important gives the response time of the web page in our hands.

While del.icio.us offers a very handy open API, it asks users not to use this API to harvest the provided information excessively. Wectar respects this. We save every del.icio.us information which is displayed on our web page through user interaction, but never try to retrieve information through own interaction with the del.icio.us API. (The last statement became invalidated by our new find related web sites feature on the front page of the wectar site. Nevertheless, we just get del.icio.us informations for the url inserted and - preventive if you want - for the list of popular/hot urls from the del.icio.us feed.)

Future plans

Wectar has just started. While we are convinced that wectar already offers a promising service - even to the extend that we are using it ourselves occasionally - many more ideas are ready to get implemented, for example

A full text search facility on the listed web sites rather than the meta search facility offered right now.
An optional visual user interface for the directory, using an enhancement of 'our' 34all graph viewer.

Wectar sees itself as part of the search for new ways to manage the exploding amount of information on the web. While the handling of this amount of data is beyond the scale of this project, we will focus our future efforts around finding new ways of representing the data, in particular visualizing 'hidden' interrelations between web sites.
So stay in touch and see what wectar will has to contribute.

Cooperation

Wectar has achieved proof of concept status and now actively seeks partners to move towards a mature web directory able to handle the expected increasing traffic.

Please contact us via

martin (dot) dudek (at) gmail (dot) com