I hope you do become an editor, webstudio2000,
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As jimnoble said, a site may be listed once in a Topical category like Business:
http://www.clopaydoor.com
Business/Construction_and_Maintenance/Materials_and_Supplies/Doors_and_Windows/Overhead_Doors/Manufacturing
And, once again in the Regional section of the Directory:
Regional/North_America/United_States/Ohio/Localities/C/Cincinnati/Business_and_Economy/Manufacturing
BUT, only if they qualify. For instance, here is the description of what kind of sites are accepted in the Topical category "Business" :
http://dmoz.org/Business/desc.html
And for Business/Small Business:
http://dmoz.org/Business/Small_Business/desc.html
The description for a category is up in the right hand corner of the category page - "Description".
Being a small business myself, I know where you're coming from and where you're going with this, and I've felt the same rage myself,
, but I think I can calm you down a little.
Most small businesses, like ours, get listed in the Regional section of the Directory down at the locality (city) level. That is not a slap in the face to us, or any kind of disrespect, the Topical category of "Business" serves other purposes.
You'll notice in the Business description that some business sites might better be placed in the Topical sections of Home: Consumer Information, or Shopping, also.
If a small business sold garage doors online, they might qualify to be listed twice, once in the Topical category of Shopping, and once again in their locality within the Regional section.
I don't know this for sure, but if we small businesses were listed in Business, each category, for instance Restaurants, would have hundreds of thousands listed in it, and would have to be broken up by geographical area anyway, thus, we get placed in Regional to avoid that (the results would be the same)
.
So, it's not an attempt to belittle small business and favor large business, if it were I know a whole lot of editors who would be raising hell about it, including myself. It's just a matter of how we can best organize the massive amounts of data we collect,
.
Now, as far as your confusion about the "Unique Content" that we look for on a site. It's not as narrow a term as you might think. What we're looking for is the unique content for the category, and that varies from category to category.
For example, in Regional, most of the Real Estate websites are cookie cutter type sites, they each contain the same buyer and seller general information that every other RE site has, so, how does that benefit the web surfer? Why not just cut to the chase and just list one of them?
The unique content we might be looking for could be individual photos and descriptions of homes that no other RE site has, or their personal profile page explaining who they are and their qualifications, their involvement in community projects, or just local information about their community.
That information might be something no other site contains, it benefits the web surfer looking at RE agents in that area, and thus, it adds value to that category.
Another example might be a website in:
http://dmoz.org/Home/Gardening/Gardens/Water/
titled Joe's Water Garden and showing photos of his particular project as he was doing it and what the final results were, along with running commentary. That would be "unique content" found nowhere else, would benefit the web surfer interested in that topic, and would add value to the category (our collection of sites).
Now, if ole Joe had two websites about his water garden, and an editor didn't catch it (many editors pass through a category and stop to edit something), then that would be considered spam, and one of those sites would be deleted.
So, if you see something like that, please let us know, we don't want that.
If any of this is incorrect, another editor is welcome to correct me, I don't know everything.
