Zeal Closure
The 28th of March, 2006, was a sad day for the internet. As a Zealot, I watched in disbelief as Looksmart pulled the plug on the Zeal Directory.
Regular visitors to Zeal were given about a week's notice. However my involvement at Zeal had already waned considerably about 24 months earlier. In fact, I might have missed the entire incident had I not stumbled across the news at a forum post.
But the dire prediction continued to seem unreal up until the actual closure. Why dump the years of hard work which volunteers had offered? Watching the events unfold was weirdly surreal.
"It's like watching your childhood home burn down", was the feedback from one person devastated by the news.
Likewise for Chris Fillius, who was part of LookSmart's Editorial Management team in 2000 when Zeal was acquired: "When I first heard this was going to happen I was a bit bummed out. A lot of people, community members and editors, had put a lot of work into Zeal."
And Alice Swanberg: "Watching the community members build their own system and monitor each other was great. Thinking up new and clever ways to track down the porn spammers and non-subtle SEOs was like a game to me."
Occasionally touted as a potential rival to the Open Directory, Zeal first appeared as a volunteer-driven web directory in 1999. LookSmart acquired it October 2000 for $20 million – and, I believe, struggled to find the right mix for handling commercial and non-commercial sites.
Zeal combined the work of LookSmart's paid editors with that of volunteers. Paid editors attended to commercial sites and oversaw the voluntary work on non-commercial sites.
I struggled to understand why, say, a newspaper site would be deemed non-commercial in America (and thereby deemed suitable for free inclusion) – yet the equivalent category in the Australia portion would be deemed commercial (and thereby only open to paid submittals). It seemed forever blurred as to what could be deemed free and what required a fee.
