"unique content"

I asked hutcheson:
you said "unique content"
Can you please define for us this concept in relation to website?

And here is brmehlman answer

>> I have a filter program running where my optic nerve enters my brain which causes all promotional material to look like blank screen.

Oh, I see. If someone places on his or her site “free services”, you would blank this site under your “promotional material” philosophy. Am I correct?

>> It's configured to display the site or company's own product or service only in Business or Shopping categories and to block promotion of third parties no matter where.

Where would you put “web directory” for example?

>> A second filter removes material available elsewhere on the web

Wait a minute. After very first site has been posted on the web, everything else will fail under “available elsewhere” category and nothing can be unique after that first page.

>> unless it's collected and presented in a unique and useful way.

Here we go again. “Unique way”, what is that mean. I can understand useful, after all you want see sites with something that will benefit visitors but unique… I don’t think there is any nothing unique left in this world after Adam and Eve, which bring me back to my original question. What is “unique content” and can you give us one example?

>> If after application of those two filters a site looks like a blank screen, I deem it to have no unique content.

... and that would be 99.999% of sites you review. Right?

Perhaps the following may prove useful, perhaps not.

Unique content essay

brucie, yes, in the marketing world that does eliminate the vast majority of the sites we see. Basically 100% of the affiliates and MLM sites, 99.9999% of the "e-tailers" and "e-book sales" and "venders of websites that sell website templates," nearly all of the "classified ads" and "unclassified ads" sites whether or not masquerading as "directories" or "shopping resources" or "portals".

But beyond the advertising nightmare and outside the marketroid nutshell, there is a whole _universe_ of content. One, two, even lots of books have been written, deemed worth publishing and republishing, and not yet posted on the web. Millions of artists and craftsmen and wannabe-artists in every medium -- writers, painters or photographers or sculptors, performers, and unclassified showoffs -- have yet to create a website to show off their own unique skills and achievements. Hundreds of millions of independent businesses -- legally chartered organizations great and small, quartered in unique and relevant locations all over the world, employing actual persons to provide their unique skills (plumbers, lawyers, bookbinders, tractor mechanics, veterinarians, tour guides, used car salesmen) to all who will come to that location, or perhaps pay them to travel to some other.

The ODP editors are finding no shortage of sites to list--we list thousands new sites daily, including hundreds of submitted ones. And there are still endless opportunities even for building websites. And as for offering unique promotional services -- the trick is to offer them to someone who DOESN'T ALREADY HAVE THEM. It all depends on where you look for content.

marketroid = what a saying - I love it!

Both of you guys’ spectregunner and hutcheson, are talking about “deferent” and there is the deference between unique and deferent.

Spectregunner. Real estate salesman or flower shop owner as soon they try to be deferent “unique” will be followed next day by others because it worked for them and should or may work for others. How many “unique” mousetraps you think we all can create?

Hutcheson. There is nothing unique about next, and next, and next plumber website (at least of course, the next one offers you to fix your tab and pay you money for the privilege to do so).

>> Millions of artists and craftsmen and wannabe-artists in every medium -- writers, painters or photographers or sculptors, performers, and unclassified showoffs -- have yet to create a website to show off their own unique skills and achievements.

Like what? Website of showman who swallow sword 4 inches longer than showman on website you probably already posted. How many “unique” sword shallower there can be and how many of them you will add to ODP before you discover that there is nothing unique about 4 inches.

You have, in my opinion, crossed the line between asking a legitimate question about what constitutes uniqueness (which has now been answered several different ways), and arguing.

In doing so, you are violating forum rules.

To recap:
-- You have been clearly told that your website does not contain sufficient unique content to qualify for a listing in the directory.
-- You have been provided with several perspectives on uniqueness, which you now want to debate.

You may or may not find it halpful to go back and take an in-depth look at the editing guidelines. The guidelines and other relevant information link to a page found here. The issue of unique content is discussed, are are the rules we follow when determing if a site qualifies for inclusion in the directory.

We are not going to further debate this issue with you here.

You may want to go to one of the websites that deal with content issues and placement, such as webmaster world or I Help You Services.

I'm not endorsing either, but those two sites, like others, have proven useful to other submitters. Be sure and follow the applicable forum rules if you decide to participate.

This thread now needs to be locked.

Wrong, and wrongheadedly wrong.

One doorway for a hotel-reservation site is all the world needs: anyone that can get to the net can use the same one, at the same time. And the other 100,000 doorways on the web are all greedy, pestilential pond scum, caltrops on the information superhighway, and it would be good for the whole planet earth if all of their webmasters immediately contracted some painful, socially reprehensible, disfiguring, fatal disease. None of them contribute any single bit of uniqueness, good or bad, to the sum of human knowledge or culture. And if they somehow managed to infect the vstore owners, spamazon template providers, debt consolidation blind lead generators, the millenium would surely be at hand.

That is in no way true of plumbers. There may be 2000 plumbers in Miami, but that is no comfort at all to the man with a broken faucet in Seattle. Even in Miami, two people might need plumbers at the same time, and it is well for them that we actually list more than one Plumbing Service site.

Flower shops and entertainers may not be such a social necessity, but again, one sword-swallower is enough for one circus, but what if there are two circuses in the world?

I've been working on Community Orchestras recently. The websites are, I grant you, often much the same, and the ones that differ are no better. And the orchestras' performances are uniformly NOT comparable in quality or presentation of world-class orchestras like the London Philharmonic -- they certainly wouldn't be able to play music that the LPO can't. Does that mean they are unnecessary duplicates?

By no means! each website represents an extraordinary amount of volunteer effort in that particular community, to help that particular community in ways that no other community orchestra in the world could. The ODP is happy to contribute to these communities, by showcasing their own artistic culture, achievements, and opportunities.

And photographers? rock bands? I may care nothing for either art photography or contempop music, and I freely grant that most of them don't consistently exhibit good taste (and many of them can only aspire to execrable taste), but the JPEGs or MP3 files they generate are original creative work -- "unique" in that nobody else can offer the same thing. Would the world be just as well off if Renoir were the only impressionist painter, or do we rather regret the disfiguring diseases that carried off some of the others in their prime?

No, we have no trouble at all identifying these unique offers of goods or services. And the only trouble we have rejecting the affiliate spam scam and scum, is that they try to pretend to be actual businesspeople actually offering services.

We don't run into this much with plumbers, although we do with real estate agents -- this kind of deception. It causes us extra work and difficulty (which we are willing to take on) but, more important, it makes it much harder for us to build our comprehensive directory of the actual "little people" that genuinely offer web content about their unique offers of goods and services -- and THAT, we pasionately resent!