Submitted by Mike on Wed, 12/27/2006 - 12:35am
It appears that the "Open Directory" project (or DMOZ) is doomed. There have been problems over the last few months, including a big crash, lack of backups, and what can only be characterized as benign neglect on the part of AOL (who have provided funding for the project.)
DMOZ has always been an odd duck, garnering much negative energy from webmasters, due to the apparent inability to get new sites listed in the human-edited directory. Some have argued that, with the rise of the search engines, that a human-edited hierarchical directory system is a dinosaur anyway, and it was only a matter of time before it was retired.
So, did AOL hasten the demise by withholding support?
Looks like Yahoo is getting benefited by this
I feel that Yahoo is getting benefited by this since these two are the biggest of the directories and any new startup would like to get a listing either with Yahoo or with DMOZ as a start so that other crawlers can crawl the startup website.
Your Say??
Could be
I suppose, but really, the directories are pretty much irrelevant - the search engines rule the surfing world. I don't know anyone (other than a webmaster) who actually cares about directories. I've heard of "googling" for something, but never, and I do mean never have I heard of "DMOZ'ing" or "ODPing" for stuff. Hardly a household word.
Now, the interesting thing is that there are some players who are lining up to provide the next big thing, community-edited search directories. Nature (and the internet) abhors a vacuum.
Now Submissions also available
I think Im late to post this but still it doesnt hurt to post that DMOZ is now up and accepting new submissions also.
I tried submitting my website and it went smooth so no errors on that as of now. I hope editors will soon review and (hopefully) approve the website.
Good Luck
Glad to hear DMOZ is not dead yet. Good luck getting your site listed (DMOZ has never been known for their willingness to list sites quickly.)