hutcheson - 7:20 pm on Oct 18, 2006 (gmt 0)

OK, I'll take another bite...

Why do some sites appear more than once?

And there absolutely isn't and won't be any rule that says, "if a site has X-many contributors and/or X-many pages and/or X-many man-years of development time and/or X-many months of uptime and/or X-many page views per millenium and/or X-many submittals per fortnight, then it gets X-many extra listings. It just doesn't work that way.

And sure, the center of a web developer's work is the website itself, but a reviewer works on a TOPIC, not a SITE.

So, I'm working on a TOPIC. My attention comes to a particular web PAGE (not SITE! remember, Google searches serve up pages.)

OK, is this SITE listed? If not, that's a side issue to deal with. If it seems listable, either list it here, or send it to some other topic (to come to the attention of someone interested in THAT topic.)

If the site is already listed, then that's usually the end of the issue. (If the site is already listed in a nearby category, that's nearly ALWAYS the end of the issue: category boundaries are at best a bit fuzzy, and directory users are expected to be able to browse around a bit.)

But the question comes back: how about this TOPIC? Suppose this page were to be on its own domain, would it be one of the top resources for this topic; would it add significantly to the value of the topic? does it possess extraordinarily high authoritativeness (such as, its author being recognized by other authorities as an authority)? Does the TOPIC absolutely NEED this listing?

So one site might get several listings because it happened to have some of the best articles available on various obscure topics that editors happened to have researched; another site might get nothing, because its articles were all on similar subjects, or its articles presented no special authoritativeness, or its articles were on subjects that had been well covered by other, dedicated sites, or its articles post-dated the time when the topic had been last deeply researched by an editor, or even its articles were on subjects so obscure as to not yet have been researched.

And for "extraordinary" sites, as Flicker mentioned, the likes of Smithsonian and BBC and Project Gutenberg (and on a smaller scale, the occasional really-dedicated-hobbiest site), an editor might well notice that the quality of the articles warranted considering how many of them might well be cornerstones of their respective topics.

Whether the WEBSITE "deserves" the listing is simply not a consideration. Nor is the number of listings the website already has (although their LOCATION might be relevant.) Even whether the "article" deserves a listing isn't really the issue, but "did the TOPIC NEED the article?"

So, if you're trying to get an ODP listing (either the first one or an add-on, then focus on two things (1) NON-competitive content: the content that, if you develop, you'll have NO competition for, and (2) information that YOU are the expert on, because of your long experience and unique studies.

Failing either of these criteria, you may find "getting in" extremely difficult. However, it may not be as difficult as surfers would like it to be.

In the contest of this reality, making an appeal like "this is a competitive category, I need more ODP listings to hit pay dirt" to an editor is ESPECIALLY ill-considered. If you do it, don't be surprised at what happens. You're tapping into a very deep well of very bad experiences, and you should expect a maximally unfavorable emotional reaction! I think this is the other side of why some discussions go so bady ... bad. The webmaster talks about being (or not being) provided (gratis!) a "fair deal" or "level playing field." But the editor was creating a rock garden, not a playing field; and sees his hard-planted flowers stolen for commercial gain, and his landscaping torn up by games-players.

Maybe the best way to deal with this is to turn the question around. Because the ODP isn't a way of gaining a reputation, it's a (humanly imperfect) way of recognizing one.

"So why," you ask yourself, "am I not generally recognized by both the hoi polloi and the illuminati as an authority? And then why do I think the ODP should be any different?" Or perhaps, "I'm recognized by the United Luddites of Hither Sneggling as the highest authority on Pre-Cambrian Philately: so why does the ULOHS perspective affect the ODP so little?" Or finally, "I'm generally recognized as an authority, is there something about my website that gives the wrong impression?"

Meanwhile, ODP editors will be asking the other side of the question, "What reputations on THIS topic haven't yet been recognized?" for unlisted sites -- and for listed sites, "Why was THAT idiot recognized as an authority?"