Summer time - holiday time - for editors living in the Northern Hemisphere: Time to switch off the PC to bathe in the sun, go sightseeing or enjoy favourite summer sports.

There´s one thing that I don't like about holidays: the necessary preparations. Cleaning up, packing, checking the car, counting the tent pegs, finding neighbours who water the flowers, switching off electricity and gas... Will my flowers still be alive when I come back?

But this year, there´s one question less to worry about for me: Will ODP still be around when I come back?

That´s complete nonsense, you say, a project as big as ODP can't just die? Well, we´ve seen the truth of that when Zeal was shut down with just one week´s notice to its volunteer community. Not that it would be possible to close the doors to the ODP editor community like that: Thanks to ODP's free use license, the results of our joined efforts are available for download for everybody, any time.

And there's certainly no lack of predictions that ODP, and directories in general, will die soon. In contrast, declaring traditional directories useless seems to be rather the fashion of the day.

So, what gives me the confidence that ODP is closer to the beginning of interesting new roads then to the end of its lifeline?

• ODP's sponsor, AOL, just sent a strong message to ODP's editor community and all the web: They've started to replace ODP's hardware. Not just one broken disc or one server, but the whole set.
  
  
• The people whose opinion on search issues matters most - search engineers and scientists - are obviously convinced that there is still juice for their tools to be found in ODP. Not only are market leaders like Google and MSN using ODP data in various ways to enhance the search experience of their users. Scientists working on new search technologies also rely on ODP data for all sorts of purposes. What better proof for the importance of our work, now and in future, could we wish for?

So, will ODP still exist when we log in after holidays? Yes, it will.