DMOZ Birthday

Wow time flies! Today marks my 4th ODP birthday, so HAPPY BIRTHDAY to me!

Hard to believe 4 years ago today, some nutty Meta editor (whom will remain nameless at least to non-editors, to protect their own reputation ) goofed and pushed that accept button on my third (or so) editor application by mistake, instead of rejecting it. Hey everyone makes a mistake every now and then, right? Oh well I am glad they took that risk and let me try and break some things. Its been a fun roller coaster ride so far. Looking forward to the next four years.

I have been so swamped in real life I haven’t logged in to edit for quite a while now. I think I made a couple of edits a couple of weeks ago. I didn’t even realize my birthday was today, until an old friend turned ex-editor sent me a nice email a little while ago. I happened to be on line at the time and it spurred me to do some work.

What I did tonight:

• Reinstated a few editors who were requesting it.
• Cleared a few Reds from Indiana.
• Updated several URL’s adding some new one’s to save some of those reds.
• Caught up on email and the forums.

Later I might pop over to RZ and see what I have been missing as well. If I owe you a response its time to bump me again, as I think I got to everything I was lacking on. I hope to get more time online soon. I am also suffering many ISP related issues. My provider can’t seem to maintain a steady broadband signal to my area. My signal and connection is intermittent at best and often goes out in the middle of browsing.

Until next time!

Dmoz: Personal Projects and Editor Initiatives

Well not much personally to report this past week. I managed to work through a lot more of my Indiana cleanup project. Guessing it was minimal, perhaps around 100-150 total edits but it was as much as I could squeeze in during an otherwise hectic real life week. I also managed a few quality control edits this week. To honor a good friend during their absence (which is about time to be over damn it!), I logged quite a few Kids and Teens quality control edits as well.

There are several good editor initiatives going on at the moment. One of the best ones, is trying to highlight a very important and well developed category. The category is for U.S. Presidential Candidates and was highlighted the other day at Resource-Zone in the “Inside the ODP” thread. Anyone interested in finding information on the candidates for this years Presidential Election, should check out the excellent work that has been done there.

Another thing that I noticed, was that the Official DMOZ Blog is still a mess. It’s a shame really.  There could be so much more accomplished with it.  If only there was some consistent, experienced input going into it. I know there are discussions going on to improve it, I hope someone figures out the best way to utilize that as a positive resource. Having it function up to its potential would be a big plus for the project. At the very least post something to remove that ugly strike through post, that is nearly impossible to follow.

I am sure I am forgetting some important ones. If any other editors have comments or projects that they think should be mentioned, by all means let me know. For now, I am off to work on the huge pile of real work I have pushed aside all morning.

Myth: DMOZ Backlog

The definition of “backlog” is :

An accumulation of jobs not done or materials not processed that are yet to be dealt with”

It is a myth that DMOZ has a backlog of submitted sites. The reason this is a myth, is that the sites that are submitted via the public interface are not guaranteed inclusion. In fact, they are nothing more than suggestions for the editors to use if they choose to, for the purpose of building the directory. There is no backlog, only a surplus of resources available to editors for their use in building the directory. Nothing more, nothing less.

I don’t know where this myth started, nor the reasons behind it. I can say in all honesty though, that in some categories public suggestions are a complete waste of time and a poor resource for the category. In other cases, they are an invaluable resource for the category. It depends solely on the category in question, the quality of the suggestions, and the editors choosing to edit there. For me, when editing in a small Regional locality for example, the public suggestions can be very helpful and save a lot of time searching in most sub-categories. The exception to that is Real Estate and Automotive categories. I find the vast majority of publicly submitted sites to these regional sub-cats are very poor resources and usually won’t look at them. On the flip-side of things, in certain topical categories for example, I will rarely if ever look in the public suggestion pools for possible inclusions. Its far more productive to search out sites on my own than to wade through the muck in the spam ridden unreviewed pools there.

There is no guideline that requires an editor to ever enter the unreviewed pool. I can tell you from experience though, that the suggestions are sometimes very beneficial and an editor usually gets a feel for which areas are better than others as their own experience grows. There are literally dozens of different resources available for building the directory, from site suggestions and personal searches, to bill boards, phone books, and bumper stickers. There is room for all of these resources and they are all welcomed help to the editors trying to build categories. Lets just not think of one of them as a backlog, simply because there is a large quantity to choose from.

[Off Topic] They just reported another after shock this morning, didn’t feel this one but they said its the largest one yet.[/off topic]