Open Directory Project

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Description

"The Open Directory Project or DMOZ (i.e. Directory Mozilla) is a human edited Web directory constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors. It currently comprises over 4.5 million sites, more than 60 thousand editors and over 590,000 categories.

DMOZ was founded in the spirit of the open source/free software movement and is totally free. There is no cost either to submit a site to the directory or to use its data.

The ultimate vision of DMOZ is to build a definitive catalogue of the Web, therefore providing the means for the Internet to organize itself. At the root of this ambition is the possibility to exploit Linux’s Law that can be interpreted here as: The more people there are editing the directory, the greater its comprehensiveness becomes and the higher its value in discriminating between the useless and the best Web content.

Anybody can sign up and contribute to DMOZ by choosing a category of interest and applying. The project is also characterized by a system of distributed authority (Mateos Garcia and Steinmueller, 2003a). As editors gain experience with specialized subjects, they can move up in the hierarchy and edit more general categories.

The copyright of the catalogue is owned by the Netscape Communications Corporation. The directory is made available to the public under the terms of the Open Directory License, a non–exclusive license that allows free use and download of DMOZ content as long as recognition is given to Netscape.

The Open Directory Project was born mainly in response to the problem of long delays with which the well–known directory Yahoo! processes applications and lists Web sites. Its current dimension and relative success notwithstanding, DMOZ hardly joins the list of the most popular Internet search sites. This might be due in part to technical troubles thought to plague the directory (Olsen and Hu, 2003), in part to the fact that DMOZ did not actually manage to solve delay problems affecting commercial players. In this respect, congestion costs play an important role. Indeed, some editors observe that fifty percent of the sites submitted for review are spam links. The huge backlog from bad submissions has led to a delay in the process of site reviewing of up to two years.

Moreover, the very vision of building a definitive catalogue of the Web appears intrinsically somewhat problematic. In the case of knowledge assemblages characterized by complementary dependence, such as DMOZ, subjective value judgements are heavily involved in the process of submission of contributions. There are also problems of agreement in both the directory structure and listing policy.

Despite these downfalls, the Open Directory Project database constitutes a massive and valuable resource, regularly exploited by commercial search engines and directories. Google and AOL (which owns Netscape) are usual "shoppers" and even Yahoo! uses DMOZ data to enhance its relevant search results. All this would not be a big deal, if the search engine market was not going through serious and important changes." (http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_9/ciffolilli/index.html)


Status 2011

Robin Green:

"I left ODP (also known as dmoz) as an editor after the first catastrophic server crash, and never looked back. I don't think I ever used it again. Now pretty much it's been obsoleted by other sites, I think - first and foremost, Google and other search engines; secondly, Wikipedia. After all, if a site's not notable enough to be in Wikipedia, maybe it's not that important - or maybe it is in fact notable enough but has just been overlooked, and should be added to Wikipedia, by you perhaps!

Certainly, as an editor, I much preferred the open style, vast scale and ambitious scope of Wikipedia, compared to ODP - it felt like a natural progression.

In terms of bookmarking arbitrary web pages (socially or privately) and classifying them so you can find them again later, there are a large number of options for that now too - and you don't have to apply to become an ODP editor to use them! The latest one I have found - and my favourite, because it doesn't require any work - is http://historio.us.

There are also sites for particular topics which do a better job than ODP. For example, I think AlternativeTo.net is more useful and fun to use than ODP for finding software - and much more frequently updated because of its moderated-wiki-style editing policies - despite the intrusive ads it carries.

Lastly, if you want, you can "outsource" your searching, either to a free Q&A site like Quora or Yahoo Answers or Aardvark, or to a pay site like Amazon Mechanical Turk, and potentially get a good set of almost-guaranteed fresh links, whereas with ODP there was always the risk of getting a bunch of obsolete links, which I guess is a higher risk nowadays." (http://www.quora.com/Open-Directory-Project/Is-the-venerable-Open-Directory-Project-still-relevant-to-the-modern-web-and-if-not-why-not)