mbennie - 3:16 am on Apr 5, 2003 (gmt 0)

The question isn't about having original content....The question is what constitutes original content?

One of the most popular sites in the world (Alexa ranking 279) is a one page site with a collection of links to news articles. Original content rarely appears yet they have multiple DMOZ listings.

Sometimes original content is the format of the site and/or the links that are selected. Original content can be a selection of links based on a theme.

The DMOZ guidelines regarding affiliate sites and original content are to prevent hundreds of listings in a category that all have the same information presented in the same manner. Some examples are certain travel sites and online stores.

For the record, the content on this particular site in question is original - not copied and pasted. The content is an amalgamation of information found via various sources both digital and otherwise.

If you happened to be a big Brittney Spears fan and had links to news articles about her and wrote articles about her life and times, that would be original content. It wouldn't matter that the same information could be found from a variety of other sources. If you had affiliate links to her records, that should be of interest to anyone visiting the site.

There are thousands of sites like that in the DMOZ.

If you had a site that was basically a copy of Brittney Spears official site with slightly different graphics and text styles then that's a different story.

I challenge the DMOZ editor in question to take another look at the site he turned down and, using DMOZ's own guidelines,

"Look at the content on the site, mentally blocking out all affiliate links. If the remaining information is original and valuable informational content that contributes something unique to the category's subject, the site may be a good candidate for the ODP. If the remaining content is poor, minimal, or copied from some other site, then the site is not a good candidate for the ODP."

I don't think the DMOZ was originally put together so that a small group of Editors could decide which sites they liked and point the rest of the Internet population in the direction of those sites.