New Dmoz footer.

Been there for few months...as far as I know :) An ODP watcher may know more precisely.

I think those links are the for PageRank.

I checked the pulse of chefmoz last year; very, very faint.

[webmasterworld.com...]

musicmoz.org -> not owned by AOL or Netscape, seems it's owned by an individual.

They are giving away that much press, pagerank, and traffic to a site owned by an individual? That's a surprise.

>They are giving away that much press, pagerank, and traffic to a site owned by an individual? That's a surprise.

So long as he isn't using it in a manner they consider improper, such as personal profit, if he is willing to pay for the server and bandwidth, along with the administrative headaches, why not? Remember, they could drop that link at any time if they had concerns.

Mosicmoz is the one that seamed very strange to me.

How does an indevidual earn that much exposure from ODP?

Mack.

>that much exposure from ODP

Smells funny, I agree.

>Smells funny, I agree.

Not to me, unless you can point to something about the Musicmoz site that smells funny.

Innocent or otherwise, given the huge -repeat, HUGE- number of complaints about the good-ol-boy network operating within DMOZ, this has at least the appearance of being an inside deal.

I'm sure ODP has a proper category for it.

smells funny

Like this? [musicmoz.org]

Is that an affilaite ID I see there? Erm, how is that appropriate?

Hey, I got a website that makes me some cash that I'd like to ahve a link from every DMOZ page to. Thanks!

SN

What's the dmoz percentage of the aff revenue? is there a 2nd teir deal?

Can I sign up for it, too ;)

I think those links are the for PageRank.

? So there's no reason ever to link to another site except for the PageRank? I don't recall reading that in any Berners-Lee white paper.

They're sister projects, in that their operational and taxonomic models are based on ODP institutions and taxonomy. One of the co-founders of Gnuhoo (which eventually became ODP) was behind the creation of Chefmoz precisely because they didn't think the Open Directory model needed to be limited to websites-- anything in the world could be catalogued under those guidelines. Musicmoz and Open-Site follow in that tradition as well. This is little different from W3C or government agencies linking to allied projects.

Is that an affilaite ID I see there?

Where?

complaints about the good-ol-boy network

Again, what? An obscure geek project getting a visibility boost from a slightly less obscure geek project? Get a life, people.

Musicmoz is a site modelled after dmoz.org, just for music related information instead of web site links. You can find all the relevant informtion on the "about" page and in the FAQ:

It's strictly non-profit
It's maintained by volunteer editors
It accepts submissions and editor applications
Its data is available for anyone to use free of charge, under an open content license.

The owners happen to be ODP editors, which is not surprising given the similarity of the concept. And why shouldn't they link to each other? Musicmoz is really a most natural partner for dmoz.org and chefmoz.org.

The only thing that smells funny is the jealousy I sense in some of the posts in this thread.

>Again, what? An obscure geek project getting a visibility boost from a slightly less obscure geek project? Get a life, people.

Amen. The problem is the widely believed myth that somehow an ODP (or Musicmoz, Chefmoz) link is a magic ticket to a successful website. Googleguy has stated that an ODP link is treated the same as any other web page. Which means in almost all cases, a listed site gets one link on a page where the PageRank is diluted by numerous other links, and the PR of the page is mediocre. Seriously, getting links from teenagers with websites, with the exact keyword laden anchor text is far more fruitful if you want to do well with Google.

Is that an affilaite ID I see there?

If you mean that aid=16836&cf=390 parameters in the link to the RollingStone review, sure. Parameter 'aid' must obviously stand for affiliate Id, and 'cf' for cash flow. The possibility that these are parameters RollingStone passes in the URLs to retrieve articles from their database is totally excluded. How could it be different, since the only acceptable use of 'id' or any derivation thereof as URL parameter is to identify affiliates?

So now we have the proof that musicmoz is corrupt, and as dmoz links to musicmoz it is corrupt as well. QED

Feel free to add that to the huge number of similar complaints.

senox, try the following. Go direct to rollingstone.com. Enter "break like the wind" (with quotations) in the search box. I got this link:

[rollingstone.com...]

Same as in Musicmoz.

It makes since. Anytime you have sister sites that is exactly where you put the links. I doubt it had anything to do with SEO.

Funny discussion, here. Seems there is noone here who actually edits all those directories (As I do meanwhile)?

All three projects emerged in some kind from the ODP, using partly the same software and are run by mostly the same volunteers. Of course you will find editors who are only in one or two of all four projects, but that's understandable, since the topics are quite different.`When I joined the sister projects, I found that I new most of the people that are very active there from the ODP.

I remember the internal discussion when linking to them. It was a time, when they were nearly forgotten by the public. So the reason for linking to them was, that some new editors might be generated for those projects, by directing them there from the big brother ODP :-) All those small directories are in a preliminary stage, so they could need some editors who are willing to work with a not-so-stable software to try and build a directory of some kind.

And they all collect types of information that can not be handled by the original ODP software, so using the ODP itself would not work (especially since modifications to the original software can only be made by Netscape/AOL technicians)

ODP: It is "Only" a Link-Collection. Very restricted.

MusicMoz: Topical Collection to music, collect everything music-related, artist details, discography, ... I am still learning how to do it right there, see http://musicmoz.org/Bands_and_Artists/W/White,_Barry/ for an example how a category might look like (in my opinion ;-) )

Open-Site: A try if a modified ODP system is working for an Open Encyclopedia as well. Devoted to the collection of indormation. Think of it as something like the WikiPedia but using a closed (bot voluntary) editor community. It includes adding user defined fields and fields with a predefined shape.

ChefMoz: Dining guide. IIRC the oldest directory in the set, since it existed before the ODP and was adapted. Devoted to restautant information, including reviews.

>Musicmoz... It's strictly non-profit

In the legal sense?

>the jealousy

You got me on that one but still it's just_not_fair. Bet a lot of hosting companies would say the same too judgeing by the about page.

but still it's just_not_fair.

So it is now generally considered unfair if two private organisations trust and support each other?

"just_not_fair", nffc? That wouldn't be approaching a whine about somebody else's site, would it? Surely not. Great PR building scheme, good technique, one that many WW members try desperately hard to follow. And the giveaway widget is so good that a commercial company (the one that believes in natural linking, would you believe?) signs up for the obligatory links from all its pages.

Respect, I say!

>approaching a whine about somebody else's site, would it?

hehe, to be honest as stated its pure jealousy. Somebody nailed it, that wasn't me.

Having said that, I'm an SEO and people have [and should have] very low expectations of me. I'm very shallow.

I still don't think it is wrong of me, or you, to expect more from certain organisations than we would expect from ourselves. I think in this case the Internet commuinity has been let down.

[google.com...]

expect more

Sooo... are you saying Wikipedia is wrong to link to Wikibooks? That Apache shouldn't link to PHP? That the Vermont Democratic Party's credibility is hurt by its link to Howard Dean's presidential campaign website? I still don't get why this is should be a big deal to anybody.

>are you saying Wikipedia is wrong to link to Wikibooks? That Apache shouldn't link to PHP?

No.

>I still don't get why this is should be a big deal to anybody

Of course you don't but there lies the problem.

I'll be honest I loved the dmoz, ask around almost had the tattoo but life moves on.

Staff see it, even I see it but for some reason many of the meta's don't. Time to shape up or ship out.

>I still don't think it is wrong of me, or you, to expect more from certain organisations than we would expect from ourselves. I think in this case the Internet commuinity has been let down.

>http://www.google.com/search?q=define%3Anepotism

SERIOUS flaw in your logic there. You are thinking like a SEO. Namely, that what is important is search engines, and in this case Google PR. This is the *ODP* we are talking about here. Who tend to be a bunch of folks that think the ideal way to search for things on the Internet is to use directories run by editors who know how to do directories. It isn't nepotism. It is the ODP notion of meritocracy. The standard of merit is doing things ODP-like. Musicmoz is ODP-like. Thus, they are deemed meritorious.

For those keeping score at home, I noticed that the offensive links have disappeared into the ether ;)

Seems that there may be some justice left in the ODP after all...

?

>For those keeping score at home, I noticed that the offensive links have disappeared into the ether ;)

Is this off topic, or just wrong?

The links that were being discussed (which have aroused rather more envy than offense) are still there. In fact, they're still being added.

Public category pages that haven't been changed recently won't have them yet, but as public pages are updated, the links are added to the new versions. And that's still happening: I just changed a category that hadn't been changed recently to make sure.

It is, of course, generally true that there is more activity the deeper in the category structure you go, so you might still see some top-level categories that may not show the links for months yet.

My bad, hutcheson.

What I realized, though, is that to clarify this for everybody, wouldn't it make the most sense for the helpful bloke to simply give away his sites to AOL Time Warner?

After all, they own DMOZ...and, he's just trying to be helpful...NOT to do anything for himself, personally. ;)