flicker - 4:42 pm on Dec 12, 2006 (gmt 0)

>We're talking about sites just as relevant as the ones
>already listed, not getting the dignity of a reply.

That's in the eye of the beholder, isn't it? You'd be REALLY surprised how many people think their tangentially related ecommerce site or completely content-free Adsense page is "just as relevant" to our educational children's website as an interactive historical encyclopedia, just because it has the same words in the title.

>You don't openly invite people to suggest their sites for review.

Yes, I do. On our FAQ page, we invite people to send us the URLs of child-appropriate educational sites to add to our links. We also state that we won't respond to link solicitations from other sites. That's an editorial policy, just on a much, much smaller scale than the one the ODP is working with.

The fact of the matter is, unless you've paid someone to link to you from their website, they're under no obligation to do it, no matter how you slice it. It doesn't matter if it's the ODP, my small educational site, Slashdot, or Yahoo's occasional free listing of random websites. Sometimes a website wants to link to you, and sometimes they don't. Except for the internal rules of the website itself, you don't get an appeal. That's really just the way the Internet is... and frankly, I kind of like it that way.