Is the Blog dead?

In announcing the blog last September, Bob Keating said:

We plan on posting every week

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Had that happened, we would have seen 40+ blog postings from the AOL Marketing Department. To date, excluding the initial offering, there have been a total of 11 postings averaging 25 days apart (30 days if you include the 81-day gap since the last posting.

The one week commitment has been met once, with posts two days apart last October. In fact, the blog is barely managing once a month, not once a week, and you are creeping up on three months since the last blog posting.

Is is safe to assume the blog is as dead as AOL's interest in sustaining DMOZ?

(No bad reflection on the editors -- this falls squarely in the lap of AOL)

((And, yes, I'm just as erratic with my personal blog -- but my personal blog is personal, this should be business for AOL Marketing))

I have no clue about AOL's plans for the official ODP blog, but perhaps it's just one of those ideas which began enthusiastically, only to be overtaken by other priorities? Unfortunately, there's nothing at all that we editors can do about that beyond reminding staff (as has been done many times) about the blog's great potential.

While it is certainly very disappointing to see it languish, even more embarrassing is the way the unmoderated comments have become little more than a link-dropping opportunity and spam. :look-away

makrhod said:

have become little more than a link-dropping opportunity and spam.

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Which is ofcourse a shame but at the same time completely useless with the rel="nofollow"

Not entirely. While the major search engines may not follow such links, they still show up on the blog or in searches where the keywords in the posts get hit. "Nofollow" simply denies them the extra crawling and resultant backlink. It's one reason my own site (though probably the elast busy on the web, uses moderated comments. I may not get a lot of visitor comments but I get absolutely no spam comments either.

Of course that requires that someone actually actively monitor the site. <ahem>

Your blog doesn't have to be highly popular or visited to get the interest of spammers. I use comment moderation on mine, as well. Akismet catches most spam but it doesn't catch it all.

Of course that requires that someone actually actively monitor the site. <ahem>

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Indeed. My point exactly. Very unfortunate.