Hugh D. Hyatt

Table of Contents This page • Contact information • My travels, in brief • About me, sort of • Open Directory Project • Google • Internet initiatives that I support

Contact information follows. I encourage personal contact by individuals for non-commercial purposes. I permit contact in response to my résumé. Note to all Direct Marketers and other Commercial Entities: Before you contact me, read my Declaration to organizations involved in Direct Marketing. Note the difference between permitting and encouraging you to contact me. If the above permits you or encourages you to do so, you can e-mail me at hughhyatt@bluehen.udel.edu.

40° 7' 54" N 75° 3' 18" W

Create your own.



Create your own.

You're South Africa!

After almost endless suffering, you've finally freed yourself from the oppression that somehow held you back. Now your diamond in the rough is shining through, and the world can accept you for who you really are. You were trying to show who you were to the world, but they weren't interested in helping you become that until it was almost too late. Suddenly you're a very hopeful person, even if you still have some troubles.

Take the Country Quiz yourself.

I used to be an editor for the Open Directory Project, one of over 44,000 who have indexed more than 3,000,000 sites in almost 500,000 categories. Their goal is to produce the largest, most comprehensive, most helpful directory on the web by relying on a vast army of volunteer editors. It is available for use, free, by anyone and is, in fact, used by unaffiliated search sites such as Google and Lycos.

The web continues to grow at staggering rates. Automated search engines are increasingly unable to turn up useful results to search queries. The small paid editorial staffs at commercial directory sites can't keep up with submissions. The quality and comprehensiveness of their directories has suffered as their commercialization has increased. Link rot is setting in and they can't keep pace with the growth of the Internet. Instead of fighting the explosive growth of the Internet, the Open Directory provides the means for the Internet to organize itself.

As the Internet grows, so do the number of net-citizens. These citizens can each organize a small portion of the web and present it back to the rest of the population, culling out the bad and useless and keeping only the best content.

The New York Times called ODP "the only free, resolutely anticommercial, openly available human-edited directory of sites on the World Wide Web." Check it out, and you might want to consider becoming an editor yourself. I say this despite the fact that the ODP is now owned by AOL Time Warner.

For generalized non-directory searching, I find Google best. Unlike other search engines, no one can buy a higher ranking or otherwise commercially alter the results. Rankings are based on the weighted number pages that link to the page being ranked, where weight is a measure of how heavily linked-to that page is. Google has a page explaining this in more detail.

And no advertising. Well... not much!

I support...

...the suggestion to replace Google's top entry for Jew.

...the viewable with any browser campaign: if you discover a problem using your browser on this site, I encourage you to let me know. I'm very unhappy with the trend towards designing web sites only for specific browsers and ignoring others. It's very annoying to visit a site and be rejected until coming back with Netscape or Internet Explorer. It's also annoying to visit sites that allow you in with any browser, but rely on tags only supported in a few browsers or leave out support for text browsers.

...the Blue Ribbon Online Free Speech Campaign! This blue ribbon shows my support for the essential human right of free speech. Free speech is a fundamental building block of free society, affirmed by the U.S. Bill of Rights in 1791 and by the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. Nevertheless, legislators and regulators in the U.S. and around the world are intent on telling us what we and our children may read. Please help teach government that such a decision belongs in our hands.

...the boycott of amazon.com, because they're the most egregious example of abuse of the Patent & Trademark Office's seeming willingness to grant the most absurd patents. Purely as a defensive measure, I've filed my own patent application on the business methodology of filing patents on business methods. Once it's granted, you can be sure that amazon.com is the first one I'll be going after. Stop typing amazon.com. Start typing isbn.nu and choose another vendor instead.

...the Campaign for Audiovisual Free Expression, which exists to empower the creativity in the digital age by protecting public access to and use of audiovisual technologies.

My Year 2000 Disclosure My privacy policy

© 1996 - 2003 by Hugh D. Hyatt