Dear friends,
This question probably has been asked numerous times - please forgive me for trying again:
In the guidelines, it clearly says that a website can only be in the directory once. Even suggesting part of a site as an independent entry can be reason for repraisals, I gather. This is, i.m.o. a great shame since it severely limits the usefulness of the directory.
Take this case as an example: I work for a University (The VU in Amsterdam) and these days I busy myself trying to make some of the terabytes of information on the VU-website better accessable to the general public. However: dmoz only allows one entry. www.vu.nl ! Just one entry - with a one-line description. What use is that? How the hell would people find info on a bachelor's program in Slavic languages or a link to the tens of thousands of articles which are available on-line?
The same goes, of course, for all the big sites.
The results of this policy are plainly visible in the directory: clicking to Dutch and then to Universities, I see that in all of the Netherlands we only get higher education in Biology, History and Physics. A laughable list of three, where some 50 main subjects should have been listed. Even funnier: when i follow these few links, it appears that none of them links to a real university site In other words: it lists some dubious exceptions instead of the main bulk of information.
For other countries, the situation seems even worse (I'm talking about universities now).
In my view, This problem links to another question: the "redirected urls's".
The guideline says: never should you make a link to a URL which is redirected to another URL.
I can't fathom WHY, I have a number of URL's which point to specific parts of the site. Let's be realistic: which would your prefer: http://www.falw.vu.nl/Student/index...sectionid=2AEB3CEE-ACF0-4497-AE48C3ED543D0851 or instead the URL http://www.iph.vu ?
Specific URL's which redirect to parts of a site could be, it seems to me, a GREAT HELP with identifying the relevant sub-sections of a site. Using them that way just means you profit from the knowledge of the editors of the site: they use special domain-names to indicate portions of a site - and usually they do so with good reason.
Apart from that, there's still another reason why redirecting domain-names are very useful. Think of the Internet domain-name system: is not every domain-name a 'redirect' to an IP-address? A redirect which can be changed every day?
My personal use for the 6 domain names I have is that, wherever the site is hosted, I can keep the name. Thus, my visitors don't even know the site has moved from one server to another - nor do they want to know. A redirecting domain-name is just a very handy way of taking care the links stay valid over time.
And if someone is going to bring up 'abuse' and such issues: I'm sure it would be comparatively easy to (automatically) exclude any abuse.
Yours sincerely,
Hans
PS: why does it have to take over 15 minutes of tense clicking to find this forum again on the dmoz site?
This question probably has been asked numerous times - please forgive me for trying again:
In the guidelines, it clearly says that a website can only be in the directory once. Even suggesting part of a site as an independent entry can be reason for repraisals, I gather. This is, i.m.o. a great shame since it severely limits the usefulness of the directory.
Take this case as an example: I work for a University (The VU in Amsterdam) and these days I busy myself trying to make some of the terabytes of information on the VU-website better accessable to the general public. However: dmoz only allows one entry. www.vu.nl ! Just one entry - with a one-line description. What use is that? How the hell would people find info on a bachelor's program in Slavic languages or a link to the tens of thousands of articles which are available on-line?
The same goes, of course, for all the big sites.
The results of this policy are plainly visible in the directory: clicking to Dutch and then to Universities, I see that in all of the Netherlands we only get higher education in Biology, History and Physics. A laughable list of three, where some 50 main subjects should have been listed. Even funnier: when i follow these few links, it appears that none of them links to a real university site In other words: it lists some dubious exceptions instead of the main bulk of information.
For other countries, the situation seems even worse (I'm talking about universities now).
In my view, This problem links to another question: the "redirected urls's".
The guideline says: never should you make a link to a URL which is redirected to another URL.
I can't fathom WHY, I have a number of URL's which point to specific parts of the site. Let's be realistic: which would your prefer: http://www.falw.vu.nl/Student/index...sectionid=2AEB3CEE-ACF0-4497-AE48C3ED543D0851 or instead the URL http://www.iph.vu ?
Specific URL's which redirect to parts of a site could be, it seems to me, a GREAT HELP with identifying the relevant sub-sections of a site. Using them that way just means you profit from the knowledge of the editors of the site: they use special domain-names to indicate portions of a site - and usually they do so with good reason.
Apart from that, there's still another reason why redirecting domain-names are very useful. Think of the Internet domain-name system: is not every domain-name a 'redirect' to an IP-address? A redirect which can be changed every day?
My personal use for the 6 domain names I have is that, wherever the site is hosted, I can keep the name. Thus, my visitors don't even know the site has moved from one server to another - nor do they want to know. A redirecting domain-name is just a very handy way of taking care the links stay valid over time.
And if someone is going to bring up 'abuse' and such issues: I'm sure it would be comparatively easy to (automatically) exclude any abuse.
Yours sincerely,
Hans
PS: why does it have to take over 15 minutes of tense clicking to find this forum again on the dmoz site?
