rejected and need to get it off my chest

very frustrating and the accompanying letter indicates that it could have been anything from my 'spelling and grammar' to 'self-promotion' to 'improper descriptions of URLs'...

A one word answer 'REJECTED' would be less irritating.

For some reason the line from a Dylan song comes to mind: '...no attempt to shovel a glimpse into the ditch of what each one means...' though there is really no connection.

Frustrating because I would like to participate and not for any self-promotional reasons. I disclosed the fact that I was affiliated with one of the sites - and even have a cotemporaneous application for one of the sites. These are sites for small local (NYC-area designers) not high-powered ecommerce sites - nobody is making millions. In fact two of them are struggling to pay the rent...

I already am an editor - for nonserviamnyc.com (an online/ print publishing entity) and I was for the Brooklyn Rail for 5 years - so I have editorial experience.

There is something deeply flawed in a process that can't find volunteer positions for willing and able bodies in an organization that is overtaxed as it is.

I know I would make a good editor and am interested in a number of areas (as I indicated in another post). Now I can put in another application and wait six weeks and chance a summary rejection letter while untold numbers of sites pile into dmoz.org. And I can only imagine numbers of equally qualified people also shot down in a equally mystifying fashion.

Any feedback from the powers-that-be would be appreciated before I submit an application for another editorial position. I fully understand that dmoz is overwhelmed by volume, so you don't have to explain that to me.

I applied in good faith, and my interest in dmoz is not in any way mercenary.

Michael Bubb

And now that you got that off of your chest, I think that you should apply again <img src="/images/icons/smile.gif" alt="" /> Just make sure that you go and read the FAQ and General Advice thread at the top of this forum.

Things to watch out for on an application:

USE A SPELL CHECKER! <img src="/images/icons/smile.gif" alt="" /> You can't imagine the way some people spell things. We're not looking for spelling bee champions, just someone who knows how to use spell check. (Check out isSpell for an excellent add-on to Internet Explorer - it has changed my life! I can't speel woth sh#$%t)

Don't use marketing hype on the application. If you describe the site as "This is the best widget site on the Internet and everyone who goes there gets a free widget, and more!" then your app will usually get the reject button.

Describe the site with two short sentences telling the user what the purpose of the site is, and what interesting feature they will find there. Do not describe the products that the company sells, and don't use the company name or the name of the category in the description. Telling the user looking at the Sporting Goods category in Toronto that "This is a Sporting Goods company that sells sporting goods in Toronto" is not a description that would win any awards <img src="/images/icons/smile.gif" alt="" />

The URL/Title/Description section of the application is pretty important, but for some reason people will write pages and pages about their qualifications to be an editor for the Cooking/Rock Candy category because they have been making rock candy for 50 years, and they got the recipe from their grandmother, blah, blah, blah... And then give us really bad URLs with no content and badly written descriptions as examples.

We really aren't looking for perfection here. I know it sounds like it sometimes, but we're not. We want people who look like they know what they are talking about, and who understand what the directory is all about. A little bit of time spent researching and writing a good application goes a long way toward a prosperous and happy editing career <img src="/images/icons/smile.gif" alt="" />

Some general advice to an overqualified editor applicant: (because your case is not unique)

1) You know your qualifications; we don't. You can tell us about them, but ... some people lie a lot, like the applicant for Regional/Africa/Egypt/Health who claimed "For millenia I was worshipped from Gaza to the Cyrenaica as the God of disease and healing. I banished the plagues of frogs and flies (I don't do vet stuff, though.) I connected the internet to the halls of Osiris, and managed his website for some time."

All right, I made that up. I can't give real examples for confidentiality reasons, but, trust me, that was more credible than some of them. OK, your application must have been more credible than that .... but it's not the paranoid maniacs that cause most trouble, it's the small-time pathological liars with room-temperature IQs that can at least craft a plausible lie. What it comes down to is, we don't pay much attention to anything in your self-description that we can't check ourselves.

1a) If you have qualifications, show how we can check them. You're a professor at Harvard? give us your homepage there. You don't have a homepage, but you do have a widget-dowsing business? mention your entry in some standard published directory of widget-dowsers.

2) What really matters is the suggested sites. If they are appropriate for the category and well-described, then your application is 90% there even if your only qualification is "I like to look for these kinds of sites on the net." [Confession: MY only qualification was "here's three sites, and I've got twenty more to list." They didn't give me any more categories until I had added the twenty other sites. And they would have treated me the same way if I had claimed to be Erik Routley's hymnology teacher -- even if that had been true.]