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.read more »