What does it really take to be listed?

I've submitted my Golden Age Radio site to Google, Yahoo, Altavista and Alexa, all of which [I'm told] use DMOZ now for deciding where or how to categorize the URL's submitted to them. The site is www.digitaldeliftp.com. I've been submitting the site to the above mentioned Search Engines for just over 7 months and have yet to have any of these submissions acted upon--or even commented upon. I've submitted to the Streaming MP3, Radio History, and Radio--General categories under Arts. Each time I've submitted, I've also asked for, proposed or suggested that a Golden Age Radio Collector, Interest or History category be added to the appropriate Category area and have yet--in 17 submissions--to get even one response from any of the above.
At this point I'll take any help I can get. Fortunately even with all of my URL submissions having been rejected or ignored by the above agencies, the site enjoys Alexa Web position 55,413--twice as high as any of my potential competitors--and is listed within the top five sites under keyword queries for Golden Age Radio, but I see no way I can progress beyond relying on Lady Luck and word of mouth for web surfers to find the site, without being formally listed by The ODP. One might be forgiven for getting the impression that one or more of the editors in the Old Time Radio category(ies) have their own agenda for specifically excluding my site from any of those categories since I seem to be beating all of the sites in any of those categories across the board--despite being denied access to a valid Old Time Radio, or even more accurately, Golden Age Radio Era Classification Category.
One might also be forgiven for concluding that such a possible conflict of interest might exist since I have it on good authority that most--if not all--of the existing editors in these categories are direct or tangential competitors. But really now . . . 17 rejected or ignored submissions over 7 months? Doesn't that beg the question?
Someone please set me straight or point me in the right direction. I'd really like to believe that the Open Directory Project is truly as 'open' as its founders intended, but I'm sure any rational person would forgive me for coming to believe that in fact it's already quite blatantly compromised in at least these categories alone.
Can someone point me in the right direction? I'd really love things to be on an even playing field here. As anyone reviewing my site can readily see, I'm more than generous in promoting the wonderful efforts of both competitors and related sites alike. Is it too much to ask to be given a fair chance to compete with them head-to-head now?

Respectfully,
Dennis Nyhagen
Webmaster
The Digital Deli Online

I would suggest starting with going to Site Submission Status and posting a clickable link to the category where you have been submitting (as outlined in the forum guidelines in that area) and find out if your site has indeed been rejected or if in fact it is still waiting to be reviewed instead of making statements that someone is purposely not listing your site.

[edited to add]
I looked at the history of your site, that specific url has never been rejected or even reviewed by and editor at the ODP. I would definately suggest checking having one of us check on the category where you submitted it to, to determine if it is pending review or if it needs to be resubmitted. As you may be aware, editors are volunteer and edit as their personal time allows. It is possible the site is pending evaluation and has not been reviewed yet.

I guessed the category and looked: the submission date is today. If there were others, the new one must have overwritten them. So, knowing that we have received and not yet reviewed the site suggestion, please wait at least a month before inquiring about its status in the forum suggested above.

I've submitted my Golden Age Radio site to Google, Yahoo, Altavista and Alexa, all of which [I'm told] use DMOZ now for deciding where or how to categorize the URL's submitted to them.

Click to expand...

To clarify this point -- Google, Altavista, and Alexa (but not Yahoo) are all licensees of the ODP data. They download the RDF dump of the ODP data and use it on their site, subject to our license and attribution rules.

By clicking the "submit a site" links on one of their directory pages, you should be sent to an ODP "add URL" page and can submit your site to us.

However, submitting sites to these search engines in other ways will not bring your site to the attention of the ODP editors.

For example, submitting your site at http://addurl.altavista.com/ may help you get picked up by the Altavista search engine. But to appear in the "Altavista directory," your site needs to be listed in the ODP and picked up by an RDF dump, which Altavista will hopefully, at some point, download and install (a process we have no control over). The only part we (editors) do is actually list the site in the ODP. We do this through a mix of surfing for sites and reviewing submitted sites.

Does that help to clarify what our process is?

As brmehlman pointed out in your other thread, pleaes don't ask us about the other parts -- we can't do anything about them.

Thanks for your interest in the ODP. Try asking the parts of your question we were unable to answer at one of these webmaster forums. I'm sure you can find one where they will be happy to discuss the basics of search engine marketing with you. Unfortunately, search engine marketing discussions are outside of the scope of this forum.

Thank you. Forgive me for not responding to this thread in a timely manner. Your responses are very helpful. Had I checked this thread again before responding in the other thread I'd have understood much better how the other Search engines tend to mislead URL submitters into believing that it's their editors and reviewers that are taking, reviewing, and processing the URL submissions through their sites.

I apologize for not understanding how these threads interact with each other. Your responses were very helpful.

In future I'll be more diligent about checking back to all threads before I make a response to one of the others.

Appreciate the thoughtful suggestions. I think you've nailed down exactly where I need to follow-up now. Sorry to have cluttered up the threads with off-topic issues.