Monday, May 23, 2005

ODPedia

Danny Sullivan suggests the ODP (Open Directory Project) should be turned into a Wiki. He admits this might open doors to spammers; then again, the Wikipedia can also handle spam (by community self-healing mechanisms).

I really like Danny’s idea. If we still want to have the ODP. If we still want that. Google kicked the DMOZ.org copy from its homepage, and I have a hard time to remember the last time I used it (unless I wanted to submit one of my own sites, perhaps). Danny says:

“Back in 1998, people were frustrated by the inability to get listed in Yahoo. And if you weren’t in Yahoo back then, you are largely invisible to web searchers. NewHoo – later renamed The Open Directory – was born to provide a solution to the invisibility problem.

It was a good idea then. Today, crawlers rather than directories dominate the web.”

A side-note: the ODP data is copied on many, many sites all over the web. If nothing else, that would boost relevant sites in search engines (if we consider the ODP data to be relevant). In this way, it would still contribute even when you’re searching with Google, Yahoo or others.
A side-note to the side-note: submitting to ODP might actually be one step of over-optimizing for Google, and risk getting banned (especially if your site hasn’t much other backlinks from more content-oriented sites than directories).

By the way, both ODPedia.com and ODPedia.org are available. Someone could get the ODP data (which is free) and merge it with a Wiki software. It sounds like an idea worth trying.

ODPedia by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (5)

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