suggestion

i had an idea that i thought was cool to implement...

It's like this ...... while the directory itself has some great sites listed and is quite comprehensive, the front end interface is kind of what I'd call Web 1.0-ish....

One could perhaps make it even more useful by introducing services such as click-to-call (VOIP-based) for companies that are listed in some categories....

Of course, this kind of a thing would not apply to a vast majority of websites... but well..... innovation starts "somewhere"... and one could then perhaps thing of other things as well that could perhaps be applied site-wide.

The reason why I say this is because the way the ODP stands as of now is useful but not very "interactive". The frontend interface does not lend itself to any kind of useful interaction beyond just surfing from one category to another and similar stuff....

Another thing: Mass spam submissions could be reduced in a big way by implementing a way by which links on dmoz do not pass any PR ...by implementing a rel=nofollow .... or some other way .... This wouldnt hurt the usefulness of the directory itself, but would help to some extent in reducing the number of submissions .....

just my 2c.

regards,
saurab

You are right about the outdated interface. But the ODP server isn't meant to be the main access point for users. We provide the so called RDF dumps free of charge, so that others can implement whatever cool interface they might dream of. In fact, if all those users currently browsing the sites of our data users would switch to our servers, our servers would most likely break down.

Regarding the added feature: Basically, we don't list "sites of companies", but "sites about specific topics". Of course, due to the nature of most of the sites, companies are included in this. So this feature would be useless for most of our sites, while on the other hand it would be a lot of work to implement it and add the data to all of the entries that would benefit from it.

Another thing: Mass spam submissions...

Click to expand...

Thanks for trying to help. Mass submissions have been a problem some time ago, but due to software improvements, they became less of a problem lately.