Thumbshots for DMOZ Directory

Improve user satisfaction by allowing user to preview the site before visit

[shaadi]

Has anyone noticed this?

Thumbshots for DMOZ Directory (ODP)
[open.thumbshots.org...]

[creative craig]

I noticed that a few days ago while editing.

[windharp]

Even the ODP noticed this and decided it is a great feature, but would put a lot of extra traffic on the ODP servers if implemented fully. Instead, staff chose a different approach:
If you have a close look at recently changed ODP categories you will see a little red ball at the bottom right corner, next to the green google ball. Guess where that leads to?

[Chndru]

>a little red ball

Yep. I see it. A little description would have been handy there.

[sem4u]

Nice, but the screen shots are a bit out of date.

[lazerzubb]

>>but the screen shots are a bit out of date.

That's nice way of putting it, must be almost 2 years old.

[bull]

Yeah, my site is also captured there. Any idea what bot they use to gather the information? UA? IP?
Like the feature, though.

[edit]

Thumbshots.org is a Smartdevil.com initiative.

smartdevil.com=216.126.89.***,
and my logs show 216.126.89.**** (the same ****) for today getting odp listed one and the css.
Deprecated: no true UA: "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0)"
Anyone else?

[edited by: bull at 6:12 pm (utc) on Dec. 9, 2003]

[jim_w]

All I will say is what Sports Illustrated said about the new Soldier’s Field in Chicago. …

‘The Bears should have spend the money on purchasing talent instead of updating the stadium’

A True Bears Fan for 38 years.

[pleeker]

It's quite Alexa-like, although Alexa only shows thumbs for the first couple sites as I recall.

I like it, too. I'd like it better and it would be more useful if they'd keep the thumbs updated.

[motsa]

Keep in mind that while this is linked to from the ODP pages, it isn't a part of the ODP and thus the ODP has no control over the age of the screenshots (that also means that a very neglible amount of effort on the ODP's part went into adding the red ball to the pages so it wasn't taking energy away from anything else). As I understand it, thumbshots.org is updating the screenshots now and will update them monthly or thereabouts (there's a thread in the ODP public forum that gives more detail).

[EliteWeb]

Great site offering a fun little service. Is the 'red ball' placed on all directories or just those that have thumbnails in this site?

[hutcheson]

The red balls will appear on public directory pages as they are updated. (This is IMO not really satisfactory: the ODP sort of needs to dust all the pages periodically.)

IMO, this is one of the three-to-five most imaginative attempts to add value to ODP data (the "green ball", of course, links to another one). I'm not personally fond of it (not being a heavy graphics person), but many editors think it's just cool, and others have found it valuable for editing purposes.

[orlady]

I expect that the thumbshots views will prove helpful for us dmoz editors when we are working on maintaining link "freshness". It may help in flagging long-dead URLs (if the thumbshot view is "bad", the URL surely has been bad for a long time!), and when we come across a bad URL, it will be one source of clues as to what the site looked like before.