Forum Moderators: open
Considering that they offer different products can I submit the high speed access twice (based on their serviced areas) and then web hosting once?
Thank You...
(Only exceptions are to Regional if you have a B&M address; and to other languages if site is genuinely multi-lingual).
The editor in the one best category may elect to offer the sugestion to other relevant categories. Those "multiple submissions" won't be treated as potential spam; thay might be if you do it yourself.
Once listed once, you could use the ODP Public Forum to advance a case for additional listings.
[dmoz.org...]
The case has to be made by the website. Our position is, if the website alone doesn't make the case, then there isn't a case to be made. Period.
Sometimes an editor will have to decide whether to list a site twice in lower-level categories, or once in a higher-level category. The ODP policy is the same: the webmaster doesn't have a voice in that decision, and no venue is needed.
One submission is probably enough, because editors will be smart enough to decide if an additional listing might be justified or not, and forward an additional copy to the right place if required.
Let's say I have website which sells wholesale maplewood widgets. The most utterly specific listing would be under--
Business: Consumer Goods and Services: Widgets: Wooden: Maple: Wholesale and Distribution
This is a pretty direct translation to widgetspeak, of how I show up in DMOZ. But there are other categories along that chain for which I'm also perfectly suited, for example:
Business: Consumer Goods and Services: Widgets
Business: Consumer Goods and Services: Widgets: Wooden
Business: Consumer Goods and Services: Widgets: Wooden: Maple
and
Business: Consumer Goods and Services: Widgets: Wholesale and Distribution
Why do I only appear in the most narrowly-defined, lowest-traffic DMOZ classification, why would it not greatly benefit DMOZ surfers to see me under all appropriate categories from broad through narrow, and why am I forbidden from requesting something so logical, and so beneficial to someone searching for wholesale widgets?
Again, thinking purely in terms of the highest utility to searching surfers, if a site so clearly spans multiple (but closely-related, that's the crux of it) categories, why should it not appear in multiple categories?
Because if a site were to appear all the way down the chain, there'd be no need for the chain and they could lump passles of sites under just widgets, and that's not useful to the end user (nor to you or me as webmasters for that matter)
The ODP is much less useful for them. That's also OK -- it is one of many perspectives on the web, and no one perspective can represent all the significant facts.
What you want is a search engine. There are several available: feel free to use them instead. (We won't be offended. Sometimes we use them too.)
Regarding clutter, to a certain degree it could be argued there is no such thing as clutter on the Internet. If an item of information can be accessed from 1000 search references rather than only one very narrowly defined reference, I'd call that an improvement, not a flaw.
Further- what if my wholesale wooden widgets are very strongly all of the following: a 'wholesale gift item; 'business opportunity', 'kitchen device', 'dollar store item', 'Bulgarian handicraft'. Anyone searching DMOZ is SOL. At the very least I would consider the search options--strike that--search option more crippled than ideal.
To be truly accurate, you'd have to say the limitation is not technical, but has much more to do with the labor limitations of a human-powered, volunteer editing system. DMOZ has to arbitrarily severely limit the possibilities for its own manageability, not the functional protection of its system. There's really no bandwith/storage/coding limitation standing in the way of a directory listing being accessible by zillions of search references.
Again, thinking purely in terms of the highest utility to searching surfers, if a site so clearly spans multiple (but closely-related, that's the crux of it) categories, why should it not appear in multiple categories?
To be truly accurate, you'd have to say the limitation is not technical, but has much more to do with the labor limitations of a human-powered, volunteer editing system.
Strikes me it's more a case of passiveness on the part of non-editors.
Editors are taking on a clearly defined role, and doing it so well that DMOZ is growing to be important -- at least as indicated by the number of threads about it compared to other directories
But the product of that clearly defined role is the RDF. Any one can take that RDF and use it in accordance with the terms of the ODP license.
And that includes presenting the data flattened, inverted, cross-referenced, merged with other licensed or owned data streams, or a dozen other presentational innovations.
If the presentation of DMOZ data in the ways you suggest is important and useful, you really need to be directing your request for it to any of several hundred ODP RDF users.
Or do it yourself. It's not difficult -- so why waste energy being dependent on others to act for you when you could launch this service yourself by the end of next month?
Let's say Google assigned equal PR to all the sites listed in DMOZ, and DMOZ allowed only one listing, which category would you select? Also say, PR assigned was a nominal 1, would you really care about getting listed in DMOZ, in first place.
Talking about traffic and DMOZ surfers, number of visitors to DMOZ is reasonable high but it is likely caused by its active editors visiting it often. I don't think anybody has got any real traffic from a DMOZ listing.
On the other hand, I have heard that Yahoo directory (or similar services) are quite popular and you can get listed in multiple categories there almost immediately, provided you pay them their fees for each category.
Search references? Ah, I see what you mean, and you really don't need the ODP for that. You need a search engine, for that is exactly what they do. Try Google, perhaps. I think they have already done something like that.
The ODP is not the perfect directory, but it's the closest one I've yet found. Google used to provide my last criterion for it by way of its Google Directory, an option I used frequently, but these days it's more of a pain to get it to function what with the way they moved their Google Directory material off the search page; you basically have to redo the search each time. :/
I can feel your frustration at not being listed muliple times. Think of how much frustrated big companies like Microsoft and GE must be who are listed just a few times each. It may be argued that both of them deserve at least tens of thousands of listings if not millions. And so goes for other big companies too. Then, of course each category will have tens of thousands of links and no one will be able to find your link. Do you really want that?
Not a flaw. Those words don't occur on the dmoz.org site: and you should think of ODP search as simply a
"site search of dmoz.org" or as a search of category and website names and descriptions. That's all. It is not meant to be more, and it ... isn't. It (in that respect) works exactly as coded, and exactly as editors need for it to work in order for them to be able to do their work.
It happens that for some searches -- informational queries on topics at a high school level -- the ODP site search blows away any search engine I've ever seen. So if you need that, you're welcome to use our editing tool. No thanks are necessary. If that is not what you need, you can use some other tool, like a real search engine. No apologies are necessary.
>Regarding clutter, to a certain degree it could be argued there is no such thing as clutter on the Internet.
Not by anyone with a clue. Have you ever searched for "Orlando Hotels" at a real search engine? That, sir, is clutter.
>Further- what if my wholesale wooden widgets are very strongly all of the following: a 'wholesale gift item; 'business opportunity', 'kitchen device', 'dollar store item', 'Bulgarian handicraft'. Anyone searching DMOZ is SOL.
You seem to be confusing dmoz.org with the borg. Anyone who doesn't find what they want with ODP search is free to use any other search tool.
As for imagining that someone would search DMOZ for "dollar store item" and go away feeling paddle-deprived in the headwaters ... no, sorry, I'd have to take psychotropic drugs to imagine that. I'll give you points for imagination, but you really need to work on recognizing reality.
>To be truly accurate, you'd have to say the limitation is not technical, but has much more to do with the labor limitations of a human-powered, volunteer editing system. DMOZ has to arbitrarily severely limit the possibilities for its own manageability, not the functional protection of its system.
You are both wrong and inaccurate.
The reasons are in fact "technical" in that they involve natural (not "arbitrary" as you say) limits of "information technology." It is true that the particular technology involves coordination of carbon-based lifeforms, not design of silicon or magnetite devices, and you no doubt misunderstood the engineer's meaning of the word "technical".
The "technical" reason involved is that topics like, say, "Music" have tens of thousands of sites listed. But it doesn't take an engineer to realize putting every one of those sites in the "Music" category would make a category that was absolutely unusable for our USERS; and that fact alone would tell anyone that we wouldn't ever consider doing it. (We cannot even take such a proposal seriously. You wouldn't make that kind of moronic suggestion to a librarian about the card catalog -- and the ODP have roughly as many categories and listings as the Library of Congress! I bet you've never even told your phone company how to redesign their Yellow Pages. Why is it only the ODP that is granted the benefit of your wisdom -- why do you have to hide your light under our basket?)
Intelligent internet users have to learn to eliminate the "clutter" that the clueless may not have noticed. With a directory, you keep going to more and more specific categories -- and sometimes you'll have to look in multiple orthogonally-subdivided category structures. With a search engine, you keep adding search terms -- and sometimes you'll have to use several different specific search results to find what you want. All web navigation aids have inherent limitations like these, and they really are "technical" in that they involve some understanding of the "techniques" of human-computer interaction.
As for why some of us work on the ODP: it is not the solution to all web navigation problems; it is not even the best solution to most problems. But it provides a unique perspective on the web. And it provides that perspective in a format that encourages other projects to incorporate its information to improve the results of their own perspectives.
