How did I choose them to get screened? Mainly, I picked out ones with focused descriptions, titles, and so on, that just seemed likely to be listable based on that info (which is the essence of what I see on the page where all the various submitted sites are linked). I correctly guessed that I’d be able to quickly understand what I was seeing and judge whether to list the site or not, quickly write the official site description, and so on.

The best site descriptions are those that editors would choose to use verbatim, but nobody ever submits those. Second best are ones that are at least clear.

Technorati Tags: DMOZ

If you want to do something that is:

A. Correct
B. Credible
C. Potentially useful

just go find a specific category with terrible listings, and publicize the fact with overwhelmingly clear proof of your assessment.

If that’s not EASY for you to do … then maybe DMOZ isn’t so bad after all, eh?

In particular, I’d encourage you to post a version of the category that is clearly better than what is currently there.

Technorati Tags: DMOZ, ODP

The gist is:

• DMOZ has many problems, such as categories that are at least five years out of date.
• Newly, corruptly listed sites are NOT high on the list of problems.
• In fact, the attention paid to avoiding such corruption is a terrible drain on ODP resources.
• There are a lot of liars and/or idiots bashing DMOZ in the website owner community.
• robjones is a sarcastic jerk, but he’s our sarcastic jerk.

Or something like that. As I said, it’s a flame war …

Anyhow, I’m flying off on a two-week snorkeling trip Saturday, and should be much mellower soon.

But there’s a second problem as well — mapping Wikipedia subjects to DMOZ categories. How’s that supposed to work? For most Wikipedia subjects, there’s no obvious single match in the DMOZ ontology. And it’s more than just a matter of the categories not existing yet; I don’t think they can exist until the DMOZ hierarchy becomes much more interconnected.

I think it would be great if ODP/DMOZ were enhanced to A. Accomodate public input and B. Have a multifaceted ontology. But until there’s a DMOZ 2.0, I don’t see how Joost’s idea could work.

Technorati Tags: Wikipedia, DMOZ

I shall explain. Also, please check out my multi-part disclaimer covering anything I write about the Open Directory Project.

DMOZ is dead. Fiction! Editing is in full-swing. Some efficiency-aiding tools are still down, but the main capabilities are all there.

New site submissions are being processed. Partial fact. Submissions are coming in and being stored in a database, but they aren’t being conveyed to the editors yet. There is no good information as to when that will change.

And yes, that means that everything I’ve added since the outage – and probably most sites added by other editors as well – was stuff that we found ourselves, rather than by looking through a pool of submissions.

Pending site submissions were lost in the outage. Partial fact. Most were lost, including all the ones in categories I currently edit. Some submissions seem to have survived in other areas, but I’m guessing they are only a small minority of the total.

Other non-public ODP data was lost in the outage too. Partial fact. Some data was lost, but not all. The forums are there back to 1999 or so, and other data survived as well. For example, red flags survived*, along with the identity of the editor who set them, even if not his reason for doing so.

*Only one of those has seriously affected my editing so far. While I listed dozens of other SEO blogs last month, I left one good one out not because if its black-hat orientation, but only because the owner previously made a public offer of bribes to ODP editors. Assuming he actually cares about a DMOZ listing, he really put his shoe in his mouth with that one.

New editor applications aren’t being processed yet. Fact.New editor applications are on one of the parts of the system that isn’t working yet. However, existing editors can apply for and be granted permission to edit in new categories.

ODP editors are corrupt. Fiction! (Although in a group that large there surely are exceptions to any generality.) The ethics level reflected in internal discussions and procedures is very high. If anything, there’s anti-corruption paranoia. I’m sure the level of supervision will change somewhat when new submissions are coming in again, but over the past month my edits have been gone over by multiple senior editors with a fine-toothed comb. Sometimes it actually gets silly; e.g., I commonly describe blogs with the name of their owner, and the only case where the name has been edited out has been when it was my own blog that I was describing.

The ODP is secretive and deceptive. Largely fiction. The secrecy is real. But very little of what is said publicly is even accidentally misleading, so far as I can tell. Even less (if any) is misleading on purpose. Given the many thousands of editors involved in the ODP – and the fact that confidentiality itself is voluntary rather than being legally enforceable — things really couldn’t be any other way.

And even the secrecy isn’t absolute. For example, I’m guessing I won’t be tossed out of the ODP for this series of posts — although I certainly may be wrong about that.

If a DMOZ category doesn’t have a listed editor, it’s unlikely to get much attention. Part fact, part fiction. In some cases, that’s total nonsense. For example, I’m equally involved with Guild Wars, for which I’m the listed editor, and Guild Wars/Fan Pages/, for which I’m not. In other cases, however, it’s certainly true. To pick an example close to my own editing areas, internet marketing and SEO blogs got a lot of editing attention in January, while web development blogs and search blogs got exactly three edits between them the entire month. (Update: I just got editing privileges in the search blogs category today. My first move was to add six new listings I’d sent over during the past few weeks.)

ODP editors hate search engine optimization. Partial fact. A lot of SEO is rather antithetical to the goals of the ODP, and frowned on accordingly. Indeed, a huge part of the motivation to submit crummy sites to the ODP is the presumed benefit to SEO.

Even so, plenty of editors take a more nuanced view of search engine optimization. For example, I added a ton of SEO blogs last month to an already well-stocked category*, and took very little flak for it.

*Actually, editing in that category has been an outright pleasure. The most annoying thing about editing blogs is assigning them to specific topic categories. And if there’s one thing SEOs are good at, it’s staying on topic. Markov black-hatters excepted, of course.

ODP editors hate SEOs. Partial fact. The ODP has plenty of editors who think SEOs are the scum of the earth. For one thing, the accusations of corruption that various SEOs throw around don’t help the relationship at all. For another, people who don’t get their sites listed can get quite personally abusive, and those bad acts are commonly chalked up to SEOs as well.

But again, different editors feel very differently — up to a point, at least. Besides, as I note every day when clearing out comment spam from my blog spamcatchers — some SEOs really are scum.