Every time I stumble across projects like Zenome, I can’t refrain from asking myself: “Where these guys come from? Switzerland?!” The world outside the closed borders of that beautiful nation is struggling with complexity, disruptions, hidden links, intersecting layers, …

How can they hope to map this chaos into a neat, editorially reviewed directory of topics???!!!

Zenome is a unique, self-organizing, internet search directory. It harnesses the collective intelligence of all its users in order to determine the most relevant Web Pages for any given search. […]

Dmoz the Open Directory Project has exactly the same mission, and it’s failing, no matter how hard the 9 thousands editors involved are working. In this article from the Mail and Globe, Mr. Connolly, co-founder of Zenome, says that he is aware of Dmoz troubles.

They are inundated with spam, and so people who are trying to get sites listed are waiting up to six months and getting frustrated.

But for Mr. Connolly the solution is simple and handy:

In an attempt to avoid some of these problems, the founders of Zenome decided to pay editors to review and approve links.

Zenome is paying his editors with “commissions based on the revenues generated by their Sub-Category, and by Zenome as a whole”. That simple. Will it work? Will Zenome untangle the web and make your search experience any better? I’m afraid not.

The title of this post refers to Zeno’s paradox of Achilles and the tortoise and the “You can never catch up” warning it teaches. Taxonomies will never catch up with the complexity of real world. But this paradox (about 20 centuries later) was solved using geometric series. I wish Mr. Connolly and Mr. Szigetvari to find the equivalent of such a brilliant solutions! And eventually the directory will catch the web …

And even the search pundit George Battelle seems puzzled …