hutcheson

>there are other major manufacturers that have all of their product lines in dmoz. But all of your product lines are, um, in the same line of products. Ford Motor Company gets listed under automobiles, tractors, and aerospace, because they are different categories. But Bubba Joe's Anytown Ford Dealership gets listed just once in the Automotive subcategory (or possibly just the Business category) of Anytown, even though they sell Mercury and Lincoln cars as well as tractors.

This perhaps isn't the venue to preach standards-compliance, but it is worth remembering that directory editors (and it's not just the ODP editorial community -- Yahoo has historically been particular on this also) is less Microsoft-centric than, um, your average computer user with a new computer from Staples and fresh bruises from the turnip truck. I personally won't list a site I can't view with a reasonably-standards-conforming browser (and the Infernal Exploder doesn't come close to qualifying). 95% of your target audience may be IE-victims, but 30-50% of your reviewers are NOT. As I said, this isn't the place for a crusade, or even a debate. (Not that you could change my mind: I have 20 years experience dealing with standards, from both the implementor and from the user side. This is a religious issue. I've tried it both ways, and portability is GOOD; undocumented features and noncompliance are EVIL.) Webmasters need to be aware of this. You can take your choice--code for everybody, or leave all your work hostage to Bill Gates' good intentions. But if you do decide to be a Gates pawn, at least mention the fact on the splash page. "This website generated by the spawn of hell, and cannot be viewed by a browser compliant with WCC recommendations." Then I won't accidentally delete the submission thinking it's just broken, and some other less-IE-phobic editor will eventually review it.

Re: http://www.molon.de/galleries/Egypt_Jan01/page The current status of this submission is that the URL is waiting in "Egypt/Maps and Views", which is the proper place according to the regional template. So long as the site has content that can be painlessly and profitably usable by people who are not interested in your commercial services, neither the fact that you HAVE commercial interests nor the fact that it is a deeplink are absolute bars to its being listed there. Editor judgment is called for. I've listed deeplinks of sites (and from stock photography retailers, for that matter) with less content than that, after doing extensive web searches to find what else was out there. I haven't done that in Egypt, so I can't comment on this site right now. I can say that in the Adult areas, "photo galleries" must include at least 20 pictures. If you have significantly more than that many, and you have a reasonable presentation (so people can find the ones they're interested in: thumbnails, hyperlinked maps, and text indexes are all good), and the subsite focus well matches the category focus (as it does here), AND the main page ISN'T in a category in the same neighborhood, then I'd think the chances of getting a listing are pretty good. By the way, it sounds as if you need to develop the main page to describe your photography services or products: that would be a listable site. And you can link to all the travel galleries as to portfolios. (A conspicuous but not irritatingly-blatant link back would not be out of line either.) [Yes, I know, people who actually generate content have an enormous advantage getting ODP listings, if they only take advantage of it.]

Wrong, I used my own charts. And _you_ must be an Aquarius.

>>If I put them in regional, they just become another local business. Their target market is worldwide. This is true of all real estate sites. But their SERVICE is always ... just another local business. There are so many real estate sites that a "global" category would be basically useless for users. And, for real estate in particular (since it's a spam-prone topic dominated by high-pressure personality types) treatment of the sites is written into the guidelines, and not subject to debate.

It will save all of us time if we simply identify which sign rules each website, and let people look up their own status: ----------------------------------------------------------------- Aries: Ambition is commendable, but doomed to frustration if you do not work within the limits of the submission guidelines. It is unlikely that every page of your site will be listed, or that two pages will be listed in the same category, or that it will be listed in every category to which it has some vaque relevance. Continue to strive for quality in finding the SINGLE BEST matching category. Taurus: Your attachment to the site which you spent so long lovingly crafting is commendable, but it does blind you to the fact that all of your content is already available from sites already listed. Your logical side, if you'd only listen to it, wisely recommends a trip to PPC-land or other commercial advertising venues for what is, after all, merely lovingly crafted advertising. Gemini: Cleverness is a talent, not a virtue: and society is benefited by neither, but only by good work skillfully done. Ultimately, you will be rewarded better for a small, original work than for a great deal of clever concealment of your plagiarism. Cancer: Small steps from category to category bring your site closer to its ultimate goal. But it is still uncertain what that goal shall be. Leo: The stars shine on your efforts, from henceforthward people all over the net will be openly directed to them. Virgo: You are truly dedicated to the public good, but subject to conflicting pressures and messages. Now is the time to open yourself to the direction of some worthy cooperative effort, preferably involving focus on the celestial qualities of glowing phosphors, and providing guidance through the ethereal world of the internet. Libra: The stars no doubt speak clearly, but their interpreters may be obscure. No light can be shed on your website today. Continued submission to the fates is necessary. Scorpio: Persistance is a moral virtue, but a social vice. The internet is a technical medium but a social construct. Beware the social consequences of committing a moral virtue in a technical medium. Sagittarius: Well-begun may be half-done, but half-full is also half-empty. An unfinished project is not a product. If you take the second step of a journey before the first, you will trip over your own feet. Capricorn: Patience is a virtue. In a category plagued with many and vicious submissions, your website must needs be virtuous indeed. Aquarius: You're wise, knowledgeable, and possessed of innumerable invaluable talents. Yet you waste time typing irrelevant drivel in the forums again, just because the dmoz.org server is down. Why? Pisces: Your qualities are not appreciated by all; indeed, your own virtues threaten the selfish editor's status. Only by full and open disclosure to more experienced editors can you avoid being malevolently suppressed.

>>Ummm, does it count that we are good people who want to make a difference? Which governor was it who visited a prison only to hear a long litany of complaints (from the inmates) about unfair trials, false witnesses, and blatant frames. He finally came to one man and asked, "And were you convicted unjustly also?" The man said, "no, I really did it, and I got caught." The governor promptly pardoned him, saying "I can't leave you in here corrupting all these good people." That's not us. We're not Santa Claus, we don't keep a list of who's naughty or nice. Unless you uploaded your conscience to the website, we wouldn't consider it at all. We just look at websites and see if (and how) they contribute to the sum of human knowledge.

Well, let's start with the basic question. What unique content does it have?

Hey, that's not a fair question. Who knows why government sites link _anywhere_? The U.S. Department of the Interior has not one but two humongous sites, each with pages for (almost) every National Park. Are they cross-linked? And why not? Don't ask, nobody will admit the real answer. (After all, neither one has a page on Roswell.) Bureaucratic turf-warlords. Bah.

>I have to say I am a bit disturbed at the expressed dissatisfaction with ODP lack of communication. Don't feel compelled to be. Notice that none of them were actually accompanied by a lack of ODP communication.

>can you apply to be an editor in more than one place? Once you are an editor, there are "fast-track" methods you can use to get quicker access to other small categories. Once we know you can do decent work, we'll want to get as much out of you as we can. (Modus operandi for a volunteer organization, right?) For instance, if there is no category for "P.D.Q. Bach", you could build one in your editor bookmarks (starting the minute you were accepted to the, say, "Michael Weiss" category), and then ask for it to be moved into public view. You can also take part in editor discussions of pseudo-classical and/or ancient music, thus displaying a breadth of knowledge and consummate eloquence that we can't so easily see in ordinary, potentially pseudonymous, editor applications. And you can see where help is needed, and show a willingness to help that will encourage us to give quickly you all the dirty jobs, including "Arts/Bands and Artists/Britney Spears/Fan Pages/Illiterate" or "Business/Industries/Construction/Spackling and Griping."

Re: http://www.doggtagz.com/ >Is there a link within the DMOZ where we can go to check the status of a submission, or must it be handled through this forum? This is the place, there is no link at DMOZ.

"This site is not affiliate site." There may be a terminology disjoin here. The site may not be "affiliated" based on some standard commercial or legal usage, but it is what ODP website reviewers call an "affiliate site." Our definition relates to our "information flow model", not your "business model." Basically, we mean "any site that consists primarily of advertisements for products sold at some other site, with links to the other site to place the actual order." And we extrapolate that definition to cover other technical means of achieving the same kind of information flow. This relates to our experience asking the question: "what can we find at this site that we couldn't find anywhere else on the web?" If the answer is "nothing" (as it appears to be for this site) then we aren't interested in listing the site, no matter what anyone says.

The search page can be used for, well, whatever it does (which, as is occasionally pointed out, isn't everything the world might want in a search). But it IS in my experience true that you can get fairly usable results for many purposes only through effective use of the "category" information. Directory categories are, after all, what we do -- and a lot of work has been put into making those categories useful (and to designing listings that are most useful in the context of the category.) So, if the search doesn't do what you want, stand stand in line with the rest of us. If it occasionally does, enjoy it: but remember that the chances of any real customer using it are very low. For promotion efforts, concentrating on Google and Inktomi will pay off much better.

Personal Homepages is an atypical category (well, they're all atypical, but this fits oddly contrasting types.) For one thing, even if 90% of everything is junk, PH is less non-junky than most things: garish colors fight with wierd fonts, cryptic semi-HTML, and badly-composed, badly scanned photographs for attention. Many people -- and many editors including me -- wouldn't be caught dead in there. Even with very modest content standards, many submittals don't get accepted. But at the same time, there are interesting people with personal pages: there are pages with truly substantial unique content (by any standard) and we have editors who genuinely enjoy poring over the slush pile and picking out the gems. The 'average time to listing' is a very meaningless value. I listed one (mis-submitted!) site yesterday within a couple of hours -- and I believe (based on a large and representative sample) that a good 5-10% of sites get listed within a day or so. On the other hand, there are spam-ridden or taxonomically-troublesome categories where sites may sit for years. You'd have a better chance predicting where a tornado will strike next. But I think the Personal Pages category is near tornado alley.

This looks like a category where, um, financial self-interest might not consistently override any sense of honor or fairness. Might you be willing to volunteer to edit it yourself?

>>I wondered if my first submission had not been written as concisely as the editor wanted and so may have been deleted. Trust me on this. If we did that, we'd delete 99% of the submitted sites, not 50% of them. Yes, we laugh at the really really horrid ones -- the dilbert-esquely-pompous organization mission statements from the one-person/three-brain-cell webmasters, the complete product listing from corporate conglomerates, the pleading/begging/boasting "letters to the reviewer", the self-inflating-from-the-third-person boasts of future success from self-proclaimed-artistes with no past production, the twenty-times-repeated keyword-spam-from-the-dark-lagoon, the late-night-TV-infomercial-sell-sell-sell frantic-lists-of-peremptory-commands to be obeyed now-this-instant-without-delay-YES!, et nauseum. But ALL descriptions are just "suggested" -- it is the editor's responsibility to get them right. Any editor will quickly learn that that means modifying nearly all of them. It may be your advantage to provide a description that doesn't need replacing -- it may get your site reviewed more quickly, more thoroughly, and/or more sympathetically. But a bad suggested description shouldn't (and, I think, seldom does) get a submittal deleted outright.

I think you are mischaracterizing the response. The problem isn't the look of the site. It is the lack of unique relevant content. In this category, "retail services" is the ONLY relevant content, and "affiliate" is by definition "non-unique." You can't wash the earwax out of that silk purse!

I've looked with Mozilla (Netscape 6.0) and the Infernal Exploder (6.0). Flash was loaded on both (as you might guess, the IE with Flash was NOT on my personal machine.) The "skip intro" did not appear on either one.

I'm not sure what you mean by "donations." If you mean "money for fast service" -- I can sympathise with the willingness to pay for service rendered (after all, you _have_ to do that at Yahoo, Inktomi, etc.) and I can appreciate that there's nothing inherently immoral with the concept ... but the ODP started up with (and built a community around) the particular concept of "accepting donations only of sweat": and nobody has yet figured out an effective way of harnessing that energy in conjunction with a "pay for quick review" scheme. (Yahoo has been falling further behind the scaling curve, Looksmart/Zeal has fallen off the integrity/reliability wagon, and so on.) From the point of view of the commercial advertiser, the lack of predictable response for a single site is no doubt frustrating. But from the point of view of building a good directory (which is, after all, the goal), that model works: thousands of sites are added daily, many of them within hours of the time they were submitted -- and that's what matters to our users. Probably the "pay for inclusion" will only happen at the Portal level -- as with Google AdWords, Overture, etc. Of course, I'd like to see the ODP have that money for its own development, but I don't think it can happen.

First: yes, there's a way to keep a site's place in the queue, and that way is, um, not to resubmit. Secondly, don't worry about this too much. For one thing, many editors don't always view sites in chronological order. (I hardly ever do.) For another, you can even use this "feature": for instance, to replace a keyword-stuffed, hypeful submission you made back in the times of your deep ignorance with a crisp, concise description of the site's contents -- which will stand out so much in the mountain of Hormel by-products, that many editors will immediately review the site because the professionalism of a well-edited honest description gives promise of an honest site submitted to the appropriate category: which is both easy to review, and satisfying to reward.

You don't like the way ODP search works? Mostly, neither do I; but I've used it for some research for junior high school/high school projects, and sometimes it's surprisingly effective at that. But the point is, climb off your soapbox, download the search code, download the RDF, and write a better one. Put it up on a website, set up a script to download the new RDF weekly. I'll flat guarantee you an ODP listing, and can almost guarantee you lots of traffic. I bet a pay-for-impression banner or two would pay for the site. That's part of what the "Open" in "ODP" means.

As far as DMOZ search functionality, you're not missing anything. It does what it does, which is generally not what the escaped MSN or AOL user wants.

If you're trying to get two different listings for the same commercial entity in the same category, please don't. There's not an honest reason not to link the two websites for the same business together. Seeing that that is the case, the editor is not likely to see that the visitor is helped by listing both URLs. The business has a listing, it is its business to make all its pages visible from its home page. And it doesn't matter whether or not both URLs are on the same domain.

AAAAAAARGH! <reworded to remove expletives, profanity, scatology, and all other emotional reactions> Give a link to skip the Flash intro. Some people don't like Flash, because it does nasty things to their computers. Other people don't have the patience to watch completely uninformative blinking pixels (however implemented) for ... well for however long it took. Just do it, OK? It's not just non-atrocious web design, it's basic courtesy.