I notice 3 unique DMOZ threads that are sending quite a few visitors to SEOmoz today. I want to welcome and thank all of the editors there who've made their way over. We may have our differences, but I realize that most of you are doing a great job organizing and classifying sites and maintaining what is still the best directory available.
Hopefully, you're not too upset over my bribery recommendations. I trust that despite our differences, we can at least agree to disagree on these types of issues. I would like to make one suggestion - Wikipedia's public discussions over content, links, etc. has made them an exceptional resource and one that is arguably unassailable. I highly urge DMOZ to make the same shifts in their own decision making policy. Transparency in public Internet organizations is a great thing and can really help to shift webmasters' image of the DMOZ hierarchy.
Enjoy SEOmoz and drop me a line if you'd like. I'm always up for enlightened discussion.
If only DMOZ still drove the same amounts of traffic *sigh*
dmoz corruption and accusations of such seems to be one of SEO experts' memes this year.
A dmoz editor's - my - point of view:
Choosing from the submission I receive in my categories I judge that a large percentage of so-called professional submitters, SEO agencies, marketing droids, and mum-and-pop-"webdesigners" are simply inapt to write up a clear, two-sentence title and description of the sites they submit. Instead, they submit comma separated lists of keywords, superlativistic marketese, show off orthographical deficiencies you'd never expect, and the like.
And then they expect me to transfer their babble into well-formed semantically correct sentences, while on the other hand they complain about not being listed in the space of a minute.
I suspect that a much larger part of all submissions would be handled in time if the submitters obeyed the basic sumission principles spelled out on dmoz.org's website. That would help quality sites as well, as the garbage would get out of the way quicker. No bribe required.
Re: Wikipedia: You're absolutely right on the quality of their process. dmoz would be well advised if it established a similar procedure.
Robert Wetzlmayr.