The Open Directory Project (ODP), also known as Dmoz (from directory.mozilla.org, its original domain name A domain name is an identification label that defines a realm of administrative autonomy, authority, or control in the Internet, based on the Domain Name System), is a multilingual open content Open content, a neologism coined by analogy with "open source", describes any kind of creative work, or content, published under a license that explicitly allows copying and modifying of its information by anyone, not exclusively by a closed organization, firm or individual. Open content is an alternative paradigm to the use of copyright directory A web directory or link directory is a directory on the World Wide Web. It specializes in linking to other web sites and categorizing those links of World Wide Web The World Wide Web, abbreviated as WWW and commonly known as The Web, is a system of interlinked hypertext documents contained on the Internet. With a web browser, one can view web pages that may contain text, images, videos, and other multimedia and navigate between them by using hyperlinks. Using concepts from earlier hypertext systems, British links. It is owned by Netscape Netscape Communications is a US computer services company, best known for its web browser. When it was an independent company, its headquarters were in Mountain View, California, but it is constructed and maintained by a community A virtual community is a social network of individuals who interact through specific media, potentially crossing geographical and political boundaries in order to pursue mutual interests or goals. One of the most pervasive types of virtual community include social networking services, which consist of various online communities of volunteer Volunteer and Volunteers redirect here. For other meanings of Volunteer, Volunteers, and Voluntary, see Volunteer editors.

ODP uses a hierarchical ontology In computer science and information science, an ontology is a formal representation of the knowledge by a set of concepts within a domain and the relationships between those concepts. It is used to reason about the properties of that domain, and may be used to describe the domain scheme for organizing site listings. Listings on a similar topic are grouped into categories, which can then include smaller categories.

Contents

Project information

ODP was founded in the United States as Gnuhoo by Rich Skrenta Richard "Rich" Skrenta is a computer programmer and Silicon Valley entrepreneur. In 1982, as a high school student at Mt. Lebanon High School, Skrenta wrote the Elk Cloner virus that infected Apple II machines. It is widely believed to be the first large-scale self-spreading personal computer virus ever created and Bob Truel Bob Truel is a computer programmer. He co-founded the Open Directory Project with Rich Skrenta, Bryn Dole, Chris Tolles, and Jeremy Wenokur in 1998 in 1998 while they were both working as engineers for Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. is a multinational vendor of computers, computer components, computer software, and information technology services, founded on February 24, 1982. The company was headquartered in Santa Clara, California , on the former west campus of the Agnews Developmental Center. Chris Tolles, who worked at Sun Microsystems as the head of marketing for network security products, also signed on in 1998 as a co-founder of Gnuhoo along with co-founders Bryn Dole and Jeremy Wenokur. Skrenta had developed TASS The Tass newsreader is an open source computer software package that provides a full screen threaded newsreader. It was written by Rich Skrenta, who did not like the rn newsreader and gained his inspirations from the Plato Notes system. The Tass newsreader was later modified by Iaian Lea, who added many features and renamed it to tin, which stands, an ancestor of tin tin is an open source text-based and threaded news client, used to read and post messages on the USENET global communications network, the popular threaded Usenet Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979 and it was established in 1980. Users read and post public messages to one or more categories, known as newsgroups. Usenet resembles bulletin board systems (BBS) in most respects, and is the precursor to the various Internet forums that are widely used today; newsreader for Unix Unix is a computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna. Today the term "Unix" is commonly used to describe any operating system that conforms to Unix standards, meaning the core operating systems. Coincidentally, the original category structure of the Gnuhoo directory was based loosely on the structure of Usenet newsgroups then in existence.

The Gnuhoo directory went live on June 5, 1998. After a Slashdot Slashdot is a technology-related news website owned by Geeknet, Inc. The site, which bills itself as, "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters", features user-submitted and evaluated current affairs news stories about a variety of science and technology related topics. Each story on the site has an Internet forum-style comments section article suggested that Gnuhoo had nothing in common with the spirit of free software Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with minimal restrictions only to ensure that further recipients can also do these things and that manufacturers of consumer-,[1] for which the GNU GNU (pronounced /ˈɡnuː/ , or in some countries[which?] /ˈnjuː/[citation needed]) is a computer operating system composed entirely of free software. Its name is a recursive acronym for “GNU's Not Unix!” This name was chosen because GNU's design is Unix-like, but differs from Unix by being free software and containing no Unix code project was known, Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation The Free Software Foundation is a non-profit corporation founded by Richard Stallman on 4 October 1985 to support the free software movement, a copyleft-based movement which aims to promote the universal freedom to create, distribute and modify computer software. The FSF is incorporated in Massachusetts, USA objected to the use of Gnu. So Gnuhoo was changed to NewHoo. Yahoo! Yahoo! Inc. is an American public corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, (in Silicon Valley), that provides Internet services worldwide. The company is perhaps best known for its web portal, search engine (Yahoo! Search), Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, advertising, online mapping (Yahoo! Maps), video sharing (Yahoo! Video) then objected to the use of "Hoo" in the name, prompting them to switch the name again. ZURL was the likely choice.[2] However, before the switch to ZURL, NewHoo was acquired by Netscape Communications Corporation Netscape Communications is a US computer services company, best known for its web browser. When it was an independent company, its headquarters were in Mountain View, California in October 1998 and became the Open Directory Project. Netscape released the ODP data under the Open Directory License The Open Directory License is a license used by the Open Directory Project for its content. It is like many open source licenses, which are used for many types of software and sometimes its corresponding documentation. Examples of this strategy may include or ChefMoz, MusicMoz and OpenWine. Netscape was acquired by AOL AOL Inc. , formerly known as America Online is an American global Internet services and media company. The company was based in Northern Virginia from its founding until 2007. It is currently headquartered at 770 Broadway in Manhattan, New York City. Founded in 1983 as Quantum Computer Services, it has franchised its services to companies in shortly thereafter, and ODP was one of the assets included in the acquisition. AOL later merged with Time-Warner Time Warner Inc. is the world's fourth largest entertainment conglomerate (behind News Corporation and Viacom), as well as the world's fourth largest media conglomerate, headquartered in the Time Warner Center in New York City. Formerly two separate companies, Warner Communications, Inc. and Time Inc., (along with the assets of a third company,.

ODP size by date.

By the time Netscape assumed stewardship, the Open Directory Project had about 100,000 URLs In computing, a Uniform Resource Locator is a subset of the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) that specifies where an identified resource is available and the mechanism for retrieving it. In popular usage and in many technical documents and verbal discussions it is often incorrectly used as a synonym for URI, the best-known example of which is the indexed with contributions from about 4500 editors. On October 5, 1999, the number of URLs indexed by ODP reached one million. According to an unofficial estimate, the URLs in the Open Directory numbered 1.6 million in April 2000, surpassing those in the Yahoo! Directory The Yahoo! Directory is a web directory which rivals the Open Directory Project in size. The directory was Yahoo!'s first offering. When Yahoo! changed to crawler-based listings for its main results in October 2002, the human-edited directory's significance dropped, but it is still being updated. The Yahoo! Directory offers two options for.[3] ODP achieved the milestones of indexing two million URLs on August 14, 2000, three million listings on November 18, 2001 and four million on December 3, 2003.

From January 2006 the Open Directory published online reports to inform the public about the development of the project. The first report covered the year 2005. Monthly reports were issued subsequently until September 2006.[4] These reports gave greater insight into the functioning of the directory than the simplified statistics given on the front page of the directory. The number of listings and categories cited on the front page include "Test" and "Bookmarks" categories, but these are not included in the RDF dump offered to users. The total number of editors who have contributed to the directory as of March 31, 2007 was 75,151.[5] There were about 7330 active editors during August 2006.[4]

System failure and editing outage, October to December 2006

On October 20, 2006, the ODP's main server suffered a catastrophic system failure[6] that prevented editors from working on the directory until December 18, 2006. During that period, an older build of the directory was visible to the public. On January 13, 2007, the Site Suggestion and Update Listings forms were again made available.[7] On January 26, 2007, weekly publication of RDF dumps resumed. To avoid future outages, the system now resides on a redundant configuration of two Intel-based servers.[8]

Competing and spinoff projects

As the ODP became more widely known, two other major web directories A web directory or link directory is a directory on the World Wide Web. It specializes in linking to other web sites and categorizing those links edited by volunteers Volunteer and Volunteers redirect here. For other meanings of Volunteer, Volunteers, and Voluntary, see Volunteer and sponsored by Go.com Go.com is a web portal first launched by Jeff Gold, and now operated by the Walt Disney Internet Group, which is a part of The Walt Disney Company. The portal includes content from ABC News, ESPN, and FamilyFun.com, all of which are associated with Disney and are hosted under a .go.com name. Along with TimeWarner's Pathfinder.com, Go.com proved to and Zeal Zeal was a volunteer-built web directory, first appearing in 1999, and then acquired by LookSmart in October 2000 for $20 million. Zeal combined the work of Looksmart's paid editors with that of volunteers who profiled websites and placed them in a hierarchy of subcategories. The resulting categories and profiles were downloaded at intervals by emerged, both now defunct. These directories did not license their content for open content Open content, a neologism coined by analogy with "open source", describes any kind of creative work, or content, published under a license that explicitly allows copying and modifying of its information by anyone, not exclusively by a closed organization, firm or individual. Open content is an alternative paradigm to the use of copyright distribution.[9][10]

The concept of using a large-scale community of editors to compile online content has been successfully applied to other types of projects. ODP's editing model directly inspired three other open content volunteer projects: an open content restaurant directory known as ChefMoz Chef Moz is an offshoot of the Open Directory Project , is an English open content directory of World Wide Web links of restaurants, the rights to the website are owned by Netscape that is constructed and maintained by a community of volunteer editors,[11] an open content music directory known as MusicMoz,[12] and an encyclopedia known as Open Site Open-Site, the Open Encyclopedia Project, is a free internet encyclopedia founded in 2002 by Michael J. Flickinger in an effort to build a free categorized community-built encyclopedia, inspired by the Open Directory Project. The Open Site software is open source under the Mozilla Public License and the content is free content under the GNU Free.[13]

Content

Open Directory Project front page, January 2006

Gnuhoo borrowed the basic outline for its initial ontology from Usenet Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979 and it was established in 1980. Users read and post public messages to one or more categories, known as newsgroups. Usenet resembles bulletin board systems (BBS) in most respects, and is the precursor to the various Internet forums that are widely used today;. In 1998, Rich Skrenta said, "I took a long list of groups and hand-edited them into a hierarchy."[14] For example, the topic covered by the comp.ai.alife newsgroup was represented by the category Computers/AI/Artificial_Life. The original divisions were for Adult, Arts, Business, Computers, Games, Health, Home, News, Recreation, Reference, Regional, Science, Shopping, Society, and Sports. While these fifteen top-level categories have remained intact, the ontology of second- and lower-level categories has undergone a gradual evolution; significant changes are initiated by discussion among editors, and then implemented when consensus has been reached.

In July 1998, the directory became multilingual Multilingualism is the use of two or more languages, either by an individual speaker or by a community of speakers. Multilingual speakers outnumber monolingual speakers in the world's population with the addition of the World top-level category. The remainder of the directory lists only English language sites. By May 2005, seventy-five languages were represented. The growth rate of the non-English components of the directory has been greater than the English component since 2002. While the English component of the directory held almost 75% of the sites in 2003, the World level grew to over 1.5 million sites as of May 2005, forming roughly one-third of the directory. The ontology in non-English categories generally mirrors that of the English directory, although exceptions which reflect language differences are quite common.

Several of the top-level categories have unique characteristics. The Adult category is not present on the directory homepage, but it is fully available in the RDF dump that ODP provides. While the bulk of the directory is categorized primarily by topic, the Regional category is categorized primarily by region. This has led many to view ODP as two parallel directories: Regional and Topical.

On November 14, 2000, a special directory within the Open Directory was created for people under 18 years of age.[15] Key factors distinguishing this "Kids and Teens" area from the main directory are:

By May 2005, this portion of the Open Directory included over 32,000 site listings.

Since early 2004, the whole site has been in UTF-8 UTF-8 is a variable-length character encoding for Unicode. It is able to represent any character in the Unicode standard, yet is backwards compatible with ASCII. For these reasons, it is steadily becoming the preferred encoding for e-mail, web pages, and other places where characters are stored or streamed encoding. Prior to this, the encoding used to be ISO 8859-1 ISO/IEC 8859-1:1998, Information technology — 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets — Part 1: Latin alphabet No. 1, is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 series of ASCII-based standard character encodings, first edition published in 1987. It is informally referred to as Latin-1. It is generally intended for “Western European” languages for English language categories, and a language-dependent character set for other languages. The RDF dumps have been encoded in UTF-8 since early 2000.

Maintenance

Directory listings are maintained by editors. While some editors focus on the addition of new listings, others focus on maintaining the existing listings. This includes tasks such as the editing of individual listings to correct spelling and/or grammatical errors, as well as monitoring the status of linked sites. Still others go through site submissions to remove spam and duplicate submissions.

Robozilla is a Web crawler A Web crawler is a computer program that browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner. Other terms for Web crawlers are ants, automatic indexers, bots, and worms or Web spider, Web robot, or—especially in the FOAF community—Web scutter written to check the status of all sites listed in ODP. Periodically, Robozilla will flag sites which appear to have moved or disappeared, and editors follow up to check the sites and take action. This process is critical for the directory in striving to achieve one of its founding goals: to reduce the link rot Link rot is the process by which links on a website gradually become irrelevant or broken as time goes on, because websites that they link to disappear, change their content, or move to new locations in web directories. Shortly after each run, the sites marked with errors are automatically moved to the unreviewed queue where editors may investigate them when time permits.

Due to the popularity of the Open Directory and its resulting impact on search engine A web search engine is designed to search for information on the World Wide Web. The search results are usually presented in a list of results and are commonly called hits. The information may consist of web pages, images, information and other types of files. Some search engines also mine data available in databases or open directories. Unlike rankings (See PageRank PageRank is a link analysis algorithm, named after Larry Page, used by the Google Internet search engine that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of "measuring" its relative importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied to any collection), domains with lapsed registration that are listed on ODP have attracted domain hijacking Domain hijacking or domain theft is the process by which registration of a currently registered domain name is transferred without the permission of its original registrant, generally by exploiting a vulnerability in the domain name registration system, an issue that has been addressed by regularly removing expired domains from the directory.

While corporate funding and staff for the ODP have diminished in recent years, volunteers have created editing tools, such as linkcheckers to supplement Robozilla, category crawlers, spellcheckers, search tools that directly sift a recent RDF dump, bookmarklets A bookmarklet is an applet, a small computer application, stored as the URL of a bookmark in a web browser or as a hyperlink on a web page. The term is a portmanteau of the terms bookmark and applet. Whether bookmarklet utilities are stored as bookmarks or hyperlinks, they are designed to add one-click functionality to a browser or web page. When to help automate some editing functions, and tools to help work through unreviewed queues.

License and requirements

ODP data is made available for open content distribution under the terms of the Open Directory License The Open Directory License is a license used by the Open Directory Project for its content. It is like many open source licenses, which are used for many types of software and sometimes its corresponding documentation. Examples of this strategy may include or ChefMoz, MusicMoz and OpenWine, which requires a specific ODP attribution table on every Web page that uses the data.

The Open Directory License also includes a requirement that users of the data continually check the ODP site for updates and discontinue use and distribution of the data or works derived from the data once an update occurs. This restriction prompted the Free Software Foundation The Free Software Foundation is a non-profit corporation founded by Richard Stallman on 4 October 1985 to support the free software movement, a copyleft-based movement which aims to promote the universal freedom to create, distribute and modify computer software. The FSF is incorporated in Massachusetts, USA to refer to the Open Directory License as a non-free documentation license, citing the right to redistribute a given version not being permanent, and the requirement to check for changes to the license.[17]

RDF dumps

ODP data is made available through an RDF The Resource Description Framework is a family of World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) specifications originally designed as a metadata data model. It has come to be used as a general method for conceptual description or modeling of information that is implemented in web resources, using a variety of syntax formats-like dump that is published on a dedicated download server, where an archive of previous versions is also available[18]. New versions are usually generated weekly. An ODP editor has catalogued a number of bugs that are/were encountered when implementing the ODP RDF dump, including UTF-8 UTF-8 is a variable-length character encoding for Unicode. It is able to represent any character in the Unicode standard, yet is backwards compatible with ASCII. For these reasons, it is steadily becoming the preferred encoding for e-mail, web pages, and other places where characters are stored or streamed encoding errors (fixed since August 2004) and an RDF format that does not comply with the final RDF specification because ODP RDF generation was implemented before the RDF specification was finalized.[19] So while today the so-called RDF dump is valid XML XML is a set of rules for encoding documents electronically. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C and several other related specifications; all are fee-free open standards, it is not strictly RDF, but an ODP-specific format. Software to process the ODP RDF dump needs to take account of this.

Content users

ODP data powers the core directory services A directory service is simply the software system that stores, organizes and provides access to information in a directory. In software engineering, a directory is a map of the differences between names and values. It allows the look up of values given a name, similar to a dictionary. As a word in a dictionary may have multiple definitions, in a for many of the Web's largest search engines and portals, including Netscape Search, AOL Search, Google, and Alexa.

Other uses are also made of ODP data. For example, in the spring of 2004 Overture announced a search service for third parties combining Yahoo! Directory search results with ODP titles, descriptions and category metadata. The search engine Gigablast announced on May 12, 2005 its searchable copy of the Open Directory. The technology permits search of websites listed in specific categories, "in effect, instantly creating over 500,000 vertical search engines".[20]

As of September 8, 2006, the ODP listed 313 English-language Web sites that use ODP data as well as 238 sites in other languages.[21] However, these figures do not reflect the full picture of use, as those sites that use ODP data without following the terms of the ODP license are not listed.

Policies and procedures

There are restrictions imposed on who can become an ODP editor. The primary gatekeeping mechanism is an editor application process wherein editor candidates demonstrate their editing abilities, disclose affiliations that might pose a conflict of interest, and otherwise give a sense of how the applicant would likely mesh with the ODP culture and mission.[22] A majority of applications are rejected, but reapplying is allowed and sometimes encouraged. The same standards apply to editors of all categories and subcategories.

ODP's editing model is a hierarchical one. Upon becoming editors, individuals will generally have editing permissions in only a small category. Once they have demonstrated basic editing skills in compliance with the Editing Guidelines, they are welcome to apply for additional editing privileges, in either a broader category, or in a category elsewhere in the directory. Mentorship relationships between editors are encouraged, and internal forums provide a vehicle for new editors to ask questions.

ODP has its own internal forums, the contents of which are intended only for editors to communicate with each other primarily about editing topics. Access to the forums requires an editor account, and editors are expected to keep the contents of these forums private.[23]

Over time, senior editors may be granted additional privileges which reflect their editing experience and leadership within the editing community. The most straightforward are editall privileges, which allow an editor to access all categories in the directory. Meta privileges additionally allow editors to perform tasks such as reviewing editor applications, setting category features, and handling external and internal abuse reports. Cateditall privileges are similar to editall, but only for a single directory category. Similarly, catmod privileges are similar to meta, but only for a single directory category. Catmv privileges allow editors to make changes to directory ontology by moving or renaming categories. All of these privileges are granted by admins and staff, usually after discussion with meta editors.

In August 2004, a new level of privileges called admin was introduced. Administrator status was granted to a number of long serving metas by staff. Administrators have the ability to grant editall+ privileges to other editors and to approve new directory-wide policies, authorities that had previously only been available to root (staff) editors.[24] A full list of senior editors is available to the public,[25] as is a listing of all current editors.[26]

All ODP editors are expected to abide by ODP's Editing Guidelines. These guidelines describe editing basics: what types of sites may be listed and which may not; how site listings should be titled and described in a loosely consistent manner; conventions for the naming and building of categories; conflict of interest limitations on the editing of sites which the editor may own or otherwise be affiliated with; and a code of conduct within the community.[27] Editors who are found to have violated these guidelines may be contacted by staff or senior editors, have their editing permissions cut back, or lose their editing privileges entirely. ODP Guidelines are periodically revised after discussion in editor forums.

Site submissions

One of the original motivations for forming Gnuhoo/Newhoo/ODP was the frustration that many people experienced in getting their sites listed on Yahoo! Directory. However Yahoo! has since implemented a paid service for timely consideration of site submissions. That lead has been followed by many other directories. Some accept no free submission at all. By contrast the ODP has maintained its policy of free site submissions for all types of site — the only one of the major general directories to do so.

One result has been a gradual divergence between the ODP and other directories in the balance of content. The pay-for-inclusion model favours those able and willing to pay, so commercial sites tend to predominate in directories using it.[28] Conversely, a directory manned by volunteers will reflect the aims and interests of those volunteers. The ODP lists a high proportion of informational and non-profit sites.

Another consequence of the free submission policy is that the ODP has enormous numbers of submissions still waiting for review. In large parts those consist of spam and incorrectly submitted sites.[29] So the average processing time for a site submission has grown longer with each passing year. However the time taken cannot be predicted, since the variation is so great: a submission might be processed within hours or take several years.[30] However, site suggestions are just one of many sources of new listings. Editors are under no obligation to check them for new listings, and are actually encouraged to use other sources.[30][31]

Controversy and criticism

There have long been allegations that volunteer ODP editors give favorable treatment to their own websites while concomitantly thwarting the good faith efforts of their competition.[32] Such allegations are fielded by ODP's staff and meta editors, who have the authority to take disciplinary action against volunteer editors who are suspected of engaging in abusive editing practices.[33] In 2003, ODP introduced a new Public Abuse Report System that allows members of the general public to report and track allegations of abusive editor conduct using an online form.[34] Uninhibited discussion of ODP's purported shortcomings has become more common on mainstream Webmaster discussion forums. Although site policies suggest that an individual site should be submitted to only one category,[35] as of October 2007, Topix.com, a news aggregation site operated by ODP founder Rich Skrenta, has more than 10,000 listings.[36]

Early in the history of the ODP, its staff gave representatives of selected companies, such as Rolling Stone magazine or CNN, editing access in order to list individual pages from their websites.[37] Links to individual CNN articles have been added until 2004 and have been entirely removed from the directory in January 2008[38] due to being outdated and not considered worth the effort to maintain. Such experiments have not been repeated later.

Ownership and management

Underlying some controversy surrounding ODP is its ownership and management. Some of the original GnuHoo volunteers felt that they had been deceived into joining a commercial enterprise.[1] To varying degrees, those complaints have continued up until the present.

At ODP's inception, there was little thought given to the idea of how ODP should be managed, and there were no official forums, guidelines, or FAQs. In essence, ODP began as a free for all.[39]

As time went on, the ODP Editor Forums became the de facto ODP parliament, and when one of ODP's staff members would post an opinion in the forums, it would be considered an official ruling.[23] Even so, ODP staff began to give trusted senior editors additional editing privileges, including the ability to approve new editor applications, which eventually led to a stratified hierarchy of duties and privileges among ODP editors, with ODP's paid staff having the final say regarding ODP's policies and procedures.[24][40]

Editor removal procedures

ODP's editor removal procedures are overseen by ODP's staff and meta editors. According to ODP's official editorial guidelines, editors are removed for abusive editing practices or uncivil behaviour. Discussions that may result in disciplinary action against volunteer editors take place in a private forum which can only be accessed by ODP's staff and meta editors, and volunteer editors who are being discussed are not given notice that such proceedings are taking place.[40] Some people find this arrangement distasteful, wanting instead a discussion modeled more like a trial held in the U.S. judicial system.[41]

In the article Editor Removal Explained, ODP meta editor Arlarson states that "a great deal of confusion about the removal of editors from ODP results from false or misleading statements by former editors".[42]

The ODP's confidentiality guidelines prohibit any current ODP editors in a position to know anything from discussing the reasons for specific editor removals.[40] However, a generic list of reasons is for example given in the guidelines.[43] In the past, this has led to removed ODP editors wondering why they cannot login at ODP to perform their editing work.[44][45]

Allegations that editors are removed for criticizing policies

David F. Prenatt, Jr. (former ODP editor netesq) and the former editor known by the alias The Cunctator claim to have been removed for disagreeing with staff about changes to the policies, with special regard to the ODP's copyright policies. According to their claims, staff used the excuse that their behaviour was uncivil to remove bothersome editors.[41][46][47]

Blacklisting allegations

Senior ODP editors have the ability to attach "warning" or "do not list" notes to individual domains, but no editor has the unilateral ability to block certain sites from being listed. Sites with these notes might still be listed, and at times notes are removed after some discussion.[48]

Hierarchical structure

Recently criticism of ODP's hierarchical structure emerged. Many believe hierarchical directories are too complicated. As the recent emergence of Web 2.0, folksonomies began to appear. These people thought folksonomies, networks, and directed graph are more "natural" and easier to manage than hierarchies.[49][50][51]

Software

Search

The ODPSearch software is a derivative version of Isearch which is open source, licensed under the Mozilla Public License.[52]

Editor Forums

The ODP Editor Forums were originally run on software that was based on the proprietary Ultimate Bulletin Board system. In June 2003, they switched to the open source phpBB system. As of 2007, these forums are powered by a modified version of phpBB.

Bug tracking

The bug tracking software used by the ODP is Bugzilla, and the web server Apache. Squid web proxy server was also used but it was removed in August 2007 when the storage servers were reorganized. All these applications are open source.

Interface

The ODP database/editing software is closed source, although Richard Skrenta of ODP did say in June 1998 that he was considering licensing it under the GNU General Public License. This has led to criticism from the aforementioned GNU project, many of whom also criticise the ODP content license.[53]

As such, there have been some efforts to provide alternatives to ODP. These alternatives would allow communities of like-minded editors to set up and maintain their own open source/open content Web directories. However, no significant open source/open content alternative to ODP has emerged.

See also

References

  1. ^ a b "The GnuHoo BooBoo". Slashdot. http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=98/06/23/0849239. Retrieved April 27, 2007.
  2. ^ Zurl Directory, archived version of Topix.com blog entry dated May 29, 2004 by Skrenta, founder of the ODP.
  3. ^ ODP and Yahoo Size Charts by ODP editor geniac
  4. ^ a b ODP reports by ODP volunteer administrator chris2001
  5. ^ ODP Front Page, retrieved August 15, 2006
  6. ^ "Dmoz's Catastrophic Server/Hardware Failure" October 27, 2006, retrieved November 15, 2006
  7. ^ dmoz.org technical problems at resource-zone.com (Retrieved January 13, 2007)
  8. ^ The Hamsters' New Home, in: Open Directory newsletter issue Winter 2006, retrieved December 26, 2006
  9. ^ Zeal Terms of use taken from Archive.org
  10. ^ GO Network Terms of Service and Conditions of use taken from Archive.org
  11. ^ ChefMoz Fine Dining Menu, in: Open Directory newsletter issue Autumn 2003
  12. ^ About MusicMoz, on musicmoz.org
  13. ^ help on open-site.org
  14. ^ Danny Sullivan, NewHoo: Yahoo Built By The Masses, Search Engine Watch, July 1, 1998
  15. ^ Kids and Teens Launches! Open Directory Project Newsletter, November/December 2000
  16. ^ Kids&Teens Guidelines
  17. ^ Gnu Project: Non-Free Documentation Licenses
  18. ^ Open Directory RDF Dump
  19. ^ ODP/dmoz Data Dump ToDo List
  20. ^ 500,000 Vertical Search Engines, a press release from May 12, 2005
  21. ^ Category: Sites Using ODP Data on www.dmoz.org. Retrieved on September 8, 2006.
  22. ^ Become an Editor at the Open Directory Project
  23. ^ a b ODP Communication Guidelines
  24. ^ a b Open Directory Project Administrator Guidelines
  25. ^ Open Directory Meta-editor report
  26. ^ Open Directory Editor list
  27. ^ ODP Directory Editorial Guidelines
  28. ^ When Giant Directories Roamed the Earth, an example showing the initial impact on Looksmart.
  29. ^ RZ-Posting by Meta-Editor hutcheson
  30. ^ a b FAQ: How long until my site will be reviewed? on Resource-Zone.com
  31. ^ ODP Help Resources in the official DMOZ Blog on 21.01.2009
  32. ^ How To: ODP Editor Is Competitor posted on Webmasterworld.com in 2000
  33. ^ ODP Meta Guidelines: Editor Abuse and Removal, accessed October 9, 2008.
  34. ^ Open Directory Project: Public Abuse Report System.
  35. ^ How to suggest a site to the Open Directory
  36. ^ Open Directory Project Search: "topix" (accessed October 18, 2007)
  37. ^ Multiple URL's in DMOZ posted on Webmasterworld.com in 2003
  38. ^ http://www.dmoz.org/News/, taken from Archive.org
  39. ^ Laisha, The History of the Open Directory Project in Search Engine Laisha's List, June, 1999.
  40. ^ a b c Open Directory Project Meta Guidelines
  41. ^ a b XODP Yahoo! Group Message Archive
  42. ^ Arlarson, Editor Removal Explained, Open Directory Project Newsletter (September 2000).
  43. ^ Guidelines: Account Removal
  44. ^ Thread: Editor account expired on Resource-Zone
  45. ^ Thread: Can't Login on Resource-Zone
  46. ^ David F. Prenatt, Jr., Life After the Open Directory Project, Traffick.com (June 1, 2000).
  47. ^ CmdrTaco (October 24, 2000). "Dmoz (aka AOL) Changing Guidelines In Sketchy Way". Slashdot. http://slashdot.org/articles/00/10/24/1252232.shtml.
  48. ^ Add Note to URL Feature, in ODP Documentation
  49. ^ Hriţcu, C., (April 8, 2005). "Folksonomies vs. Ontologies". http://hritcu.wordpress.com/2005/04/08/folksonomies-vs-ontologies/.
  50. ^ Shirky, C. (March 15, 2005). "Ontology is Overrated: Links, Tags, and Post-hoc Metadata". ITConversations. http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail470.html.
  51. ^ Hammond, T.; Hannay, T.; Lund, B. & Scott, J. (April 2005). "Social Bookmarking Tools (I)". D-Lib Magazine. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april05/hammond/04hammond.html.
  52. ^ Open Directory Search Guide
  53. ^ FSF: Non-Free Documentation Licenses: "The primary problems are that your right to redistribute any given version is not permanent and that it requires the user to keep checking back at that site, which is too restrictive of the user's freedom."

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Categories: Netscape | Collaboration | Internet properties established in 1998 | Open content projects | Time Warner subsidiaries | Web directories

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