Zeal

» see zeal.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

i used web directories the way most people did around 2000, as the thing you fell back on when the search box came back with nothing useful. i could not have told you which directory i was looking at. the listings arrived inside somebody else's search results with somebody else's logo on the page. that turns out to be most of what happened to zeal.

it opened in 1999, founded by brian goler and kevin berk, and its idea was a compensation scheme rather than a piece of technology. volunteers wrote the site profiles and sorted them into categories, the same labor that built the open directory, except that zeal paid for it in credits which converted into donations to a nonprofit of the editor's choosing. you did the work and a charity got the money.

there was a ladder attached. you passed an entry test before you were allowed to submit anything at all, and points earned you further exams which let you adopt existing categories and create new ones. the ranks ran from community member up to zealot, with expert zealots above them mentoring everybody below and watching the day to day.

it worked, which is the part worth saying plainly. by march 2003 zeal had passed 250,000 listings and it eventually went beyond 400,000, all of it produced by people who were never paid a wage for any of it.

~ the dossier ~

~ what the work was actually for ~

looksmart bought zeal in october 2000 for twenty million dollars, and what it bought was a supply. looksmart's own business was a commercial directory where a site paid a review fee, at one point two hundred and ninety nine dollars, to be looked at and listed, and those listings then went out to partners with microsoft's msn far and away the biggest of them.

zeal sat beside that as the noncommercial half, and its categories and profiles were pulled at intervals into looksmart's system and into its partners' systems. the volunteers were building a directory in exchange for a charity credit. the company was shipping what they built to microsoft. both facts were public and neither was ever quite stated in the same sentence by anyone at looksmart.

the tension surfaced in april 2002, when looksmart emailed every site that had paid the review fee to say the model was changing to pay per click. the commercial side became an auction. the unpaid side carried on writing profiles for donations.

~ what happened to the work ~

in october 2003 msn said it would not renew. the two microsoft deals were about sixty eight percent of looksmart's revenue and the stock fell close to sixty percent on the announcement. half the staff went in december, msn stopped carrying the listings in the middle of january 2004, and looksmart spent the next two years as a much smaller company looking for something else to be.

zeal was announced dead around 22 march 2006 and stopped working on the 28th. the note to the volunteers thanked them for contributing their time and their knowledge to the directory. it added that the company was not selling zeal.com and had no future plans for it, then pointed them at furl.net, looksmart's social bookmarking site, on the theory that saving links was more or less what they had been doing anyway. the archive brackets it cleanly, with a full three thousand three hundred byte homepage on 2 march and a seventeen hundred byte stub on the 29th.

the domain sold in october 2007 for fifty thousand dollars, two and a half percent of what looksmart had paid for the thing living on it. furl went to diigo and closed in 2009. the several hundred people who wrote the listings kept whatever their charities had already received, which is more than most volunteer web labor has ever gotten back.

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