Marian Petrides wrote:
All the more reason to make sure Rev-related sites are included in the
DMOZ listing:
<http://dmoz.org/Computers/Programming/Languages/Transcript/>
DMOZ feeds most major search engines and is the world's largest
hand-edited directory. While no panacea, it helps folks find what
they're looking for.
>
> Actually what IS DMOZ, now that you mention it.
The cool thing about DMOZ is that most folks never need to know a thing
about it to still benefit from it.
DMOZ is a dumb acronym (Directory MOZilla) for the Open Directory
Project, the world's largest hand-edited index of web sites. Browse
around in it from the link above and tell me you're not impressed. :)
Being hand-edited, its entries have a MUCH higher quality of search
results than purely machine-derived search engines like Inktomi and the
other spiders that feed Google, MSN, Yahoo, Alta Vista, AOL, etc.
For example there are a lot of people who spend their lives trying to
game the seach engines, with crude tricks like keyword spamming and
slightly less crude tricks like user-agent redirects. Google's PageRank
algo is revised at least quarterly to fight spammy sites but with DMOZ
they don't stand a chance from the start, since a human editor will
review the site to ensure it's relevant for the proposed category.
Also, the personal attention given to the index by its hundreds of
volunteers means that sites are unusually well categorized, which lends
even greater quality to the relevance of search results.
And being the biggest of such indexes, DMOZ (or OPD, whichever you
prefer) it's extremely valuable to machine-driven search engines to help
weight and validate search results.
And perhaps best of all it's a truly open project, so you can mirror it
or use the data in a wide range of applications.
So for all these reasons, the major search engines incorporate the DMOZ
database into their own systems for evaluating and ranking pages. No
matter which search engine you use, chances are the good results you've
used were derived in part from DMOZ data.
I suggest submitting Rev sites to it on this list about once a quarter
for that reason: DMOZ' influence is vast, so the more sites we get
posted there the more Rev-related concepts will influence the larger
search pool.
There are only 25 sites there now, but I know of many more. So in
practial terms Rev is underrepresented there. Once the number of sites
listed there begins to more accurately reflect the true size of the
community, then folks using search engines for things like
"cross-platform development" and "internet applications" will have a
better chance of having Rev-related sites appropriately ranked among
their search engine results.
Chances are these sites are indexed anyway by spiders, but a listing at
DMOZ can help raise spider frequency and sometimes the ranking as well.
For additional background see <http://dmoz.org/about.html>.
I think DMOZ is one of the best examples of community efforts ever. Hats
off to the volunteers who make it possible!
--
Richard Gaskin
Fourth World Media Corporation
__________________________________________________
Rev tools and more: http://www.fourthworld.com/rev
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