Since today is Halloween, we thought it would be a good opportunity to highlight our favorite little monsters, the Mozzies, who you may have noticed lurking around DMOZ. Ever wondered who made them, or why? Editor kazhar has compiled a great history for us.

Happy Halloween!



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What are the little creatures in every DMOZ category?

DMOZ was started in 1998 under the name of Open Directory Project. But between 1998 and 1999, the directory was acquired by Netscape Communications and was moved to http://directory.mozilla.org. Later, the address was shortened to dmoz.org.

A bit later after that, Netscape was purchased by AOL. AOL still owns Netscape and DMOZ, although the Mozilla Foundation is now autonomous and has brought us the Firefox browser.

Now that you know a bit more about the history of the Open Directory Project, it is time to talk about what we call the Mozzies. Have you seen the little creatures at the bottom right of every DMOZ page? These are the Mozzies.

Mozzie -- or Mozilla to give him his full name -- was originally a mascot belonging to Netscape. Because of this relationship, DMOZ editors decided to add him at the bottom of every page.

And they even took it a step further to make different Mozzies depending on the category ...

Every editor has the option to change the Mozzie on every category where he can edit. Today we actually have hundreds of Mozzies available. You can see them all in the bookmarks of Mozzie.


So now you might be wondering who makes the Mozzies. Well, guess ;-)

Good guess. It is the editors. We all can suggest Mozzies to the community, and some of us have the ability to upload new Mozzies on the server. When a new Mozzie is uploaded, the editor responsible only needs to add the appropriate link in the Mozzie's bookmarks.

Maybe you feel like an artist? Well, why not draw us a new Mozilla for your favorite subject? That's very easy! Make your Mozzie the most beautiful you can. Then, apply to become an editor (for example, in the category where you'd like to see the Mozzie listed). Of course, you should also enjoy and be willing to commit time to editing. Wait for your application to be approved. When it is approved, you'll be able to submit a new Mozzie. To know the steps to follow for that, just ask an editor, on the editors' forum, for example.

Note: This post updates the previous version to make several additions/corrections.

About a year ago, we heard from a brand-new editor who shared his experience of his first month with the project. If you've wondered what's happened since then, wonder no more! Editor laigh is back with a follow-up to tell us all about his first (very busy) year with the ODP!

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Hello again from me, laigh, to all the readers of the DMOZ blog. I hope the last year has been kind to you and it has been a good one.

You first met me when I wrote an article called DMOZ...Why I Joined And Why I Love It away back in the midst of time in October 2007. At this time I was fledgling volunteer who was looking forward to a long and varied career as an editor in the directory. I had just been granted permissions and I shared my experiences as a newly-accepted editor. I would love to share my experiences from then until now and to show how my ODP "career" has progressed.

As I say, at the time of writing of the last article, I had only been an editor for a month or so and at that time I had only completed about 3000 edits. I was editing furiously and was enjoying it thoroughly. I was originally accepted to edit in the category at Regional/Europe/United_Kingdom/Scotland/South_Ayrshire/Ayr/Business_an d_Economy/Shopping but by the time of writing in October 2007 I had been given permissions to edit in Regional/Europe/United_Kingdom/Scotland/South_Ayrshire, Regional/Europe/United_Kingdom/Scotland/Business_and_Economy, Society/Organizations/Lineage/Cultural/Clans and Sports/Football/Rugby_Union. The encouragement I was receiving from senior and more experienced editors was vital to my success and I received it in abundance from all concerned.

Where am I now and what am I doing? Well the basics are that I have completed over 41000 edits and I am now listed, as you can see from my profile, as an editor in the top of the categories in Regional/ and Sports/ and also have permissions to edit in Reference/Education/Colleges_and_Universities/Europe/United_Kingdom/Scotland/. You will also notice that I am listed as an editor in Regional/Europe/United_Kingdom/, Regional/Europe/United_Kingdom/Scotland/, Regional/North_America/United_States/ and Sports/Football/Rugby_Union/. Although I have achieved permissions to edit higher up in these category trees, I have retained these specific categories as these are the categories I like to concentrate on and the ones I feel most expert in.

What have the 41000 edits consisted of? Well, basically, I have been involved in adding new sites to the directory, I think in the region of 17500, updating existing listings, creating new categories, deleting old ones and much more. For instance, I was involved recently in a revamp of the category at Sports/Football/Rugby_Union where the ontology had become slightly outdated and it required a bit of a face lift. It took over a week to sort it all out, but hopefully the effort was worth it as I believe we now have a category more suited to our visitors.

As you can also see from my profile, I am also involved in several projects that are ongoing for the directory. These projects are set up when ideas are thought up for improvements all around ODP. I am luckily the project manager on one and thoroughly enjoy the interactions these projects bring with my fellow editors. I have made many good friends with people from all over the world during my time here at ODP and indeed even managed to meet up with a member of staff, from Australia, in Dublin over a pint of Guinness when we both happened to be in the city at the same time.

At the end of last year I was nominated for several Mozzie awards, which you can also see on my profile, including Best Ambassador, Most Long Winded Editor and Most Congenial Editor. I also won the award for Best New Regional Editor, Best New Society Editor and came Runner Up in the categories of Best New Editor and Most Improved Category or Reorganisation which was for my assistance in the expanding of the category at Regional/Europe/United_Kingdom/Scotland/Highland/ which we managed to add over 200 new localities and nearly 3000 sites to.

I also spend much of my time trying to help and mentor newer editors within the ODP. This is a very important job as helping and encouraging other editors is vital to the ongoing success of the project. It can be a bewildering place to be when you first start but when you have the help of more experienced editors, like I did, it is a much more pleasant and rewarding place to be.

Anyway, I hope that this small précis of what I have been up to has been good reading for you and I would encourage anybody thinking of joining the project as an editor to go ahead and apply to do so. You will find it a very rewarding hobby and you will get a great sense of achievement from it when you help to grow and maintain the world's best internet resource.

Take care and hope to see you soon as an editor at DMOZ.

One of the most frequently asked questions about DMOZ is what happens once a site is submitted to the directory. To help provide some insight into the review process, editor chaos127 has prepared an excellent and thorough guide to the way in which editors route and review sites.

Emily

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Website owners often complain about the time it takes for the sites they suggest to be listed in the Open Directory Project. Indeed, many often assume that their site has been rejected when it doesn't show up within a couple of weeks. Instead, it is far more likely that the site is still waiting for a volunteer editor to review it.

So why does it take so long to review suggested sites? Well, we get something in the region of 30,000 new site suggestions every week, and the number of active editors is currently just under 6,000. The process of reviewing and listing a site is not as straightforward as some people might think. First, editors need to check whether or not the site meets out site selection criteria. Then they need to ensure that the title and description follow our editing style guidelines, editing or rewriting them if necessary. Finally, the editor needs to make sure the listing is published in the most appropriate category. (And of course adding suggested sites isn't the only thing that editors need to do to build and maintain the directory - but that's something for a future post).

To help readers understand all the processed that go in to approving (or rejecting) a suggested site, we've prepared a step-by-step guide: How suggested sites are reviewed and published at the ODP. You'll see that using the correct title, providing a proper description, and suggesting your site to the right category are all likely to speed up the process of getting your site listed. It will also leave more editorial time free for reviewing everyone else's sites too.


How suggested sites are reviewed and published at the ODP

The following step-by-step guide details the typical way in which a publicly suggested site is reviewed and listed (or rejected) by editors at the Open Directory Project. For further details about site suggestions, please see: ODP Help: Submitting your site.

1. A member of the public finds a good website that isn't listing in the ODP. (There is no requirement for it to be the owner of the site who suggests it.)

2. He/she finds a suitable category and uses the "suggest URL" form to suggest it to us. A confirmation screen shows that the suggestion has been received. (No other communication from the ODP or its editors concerning the suggestion should be expected.)

3. Some manual spam filters allow repeated, multiple, automatic, and malicious submissions to be filtered out at an early stage and prevent ordinary editors having to deal with such suggestions. Only suggestions made in clear defiance of the site suggestion instructions are removed at this point.

4. A couple of days after the suggestion was made, the site suggestion appears in the unreviewed pool of the category in question. The unreviewed pool for each category is a special hidden area visible only to editors. It contains the sites suggested to that category by the public, and also any sites specifically moved there by editors.

5. Time passes until an editor with permissions in that category decides to look at the unreviewed pool and review some sites. This could take anywhere from a few minutes to a year or more. (Note that all editors are volunteers, adding new sites isn't the only editing activity, and that public suggestions aren't the only source of sites to add.)

6. An editor decides to review some sites in the category in question. The editor may or may not decide to look at the particular suggestion. Some look at sites in date order, some look for ones with titles and descriptions that already meet our guidelines for site titles and descriptions.

• If the site is not looked at this time, go back to #5.
• If it is, then go on to #7

7. An editor looks at the suggested site, and tries to decide if it's listable based on our site selection criteria. In some cases this is easy, and will take just a few seconds. In others, it may take significantly longer, and the editor may even feel that they're unable to decide themselves right now. Possible outcomes include:

• The site is found to be listable, and the editor decides they want to list it. Go to #8.
• The site is found to be listable, but the editor decides to leave it for now for some reason - perhaps the editor has something else to do in real life, or the description would need a major (time-consuming) re-write. Go to #5.
• The editor isn't sure, so decides to leave the site for now. Perhaps someone else will have a better opinion before he/she comes back to it later. Or perhaps they'll ask a more experienced editor for an opinion. Go to #5.
• The editor isn't sure, but does know that the site doesn't belong where is it now. He/she sends the site to the unreviewed pool of a more suitable category for evaluation by an editor with more experience in that area. Go to #5.
• The site isn't listable, and so is deleted.

8. The editor now has to decide if the current category is the best one for the site, and if necessary rewrite the description to meet our site description guidelines. If the current category is suitable, then the description is rewritten and the site published. Go to #9. If not, then the site will sent to a more appropriate category. There are now several possibilities:

• The editor has permissions in the destination category, and is sure the site should be listed there, and so publishes the site. Go to #9.
• The editor has permissions in the destination category, but instead sends the site to the unreviewed pool there. This could be for a variety of reasons - perhaps he/she doesn't have that much experience in that area and isn't sure exactly which category it should be listed in; or perhaps he/she doesn't want to spend time rewriting the description, and would prefer to spend their building up listings in the current category that he/she is working on. Go to #5.
• The editor doesn't have permissions in the destination category, so the site can only be sent to the unreviewed pool. Go to #5.

9. The site is now officially listed in the ODP.

• The publicly viewable pages at http://www.dmoz.org/ will update to reflect this within a couple of days (and usually much faster), but the database that the search function is based on is only updated once a week.
• It may take up to two weeks for the listing to appear in the RDF Data Dump, which is available for download and use by others under the ODP licence.
• Downstream users of the RDF Dump (e.g. the Google Directory) update their own data sets on their own schedules, over which the ODP has no control. If a site is listed in the ODP, but not showing up in data presented by downstream users, then this matter should be taken up with the downstream user in question.

As a new staff member on this project, I wanted to find out what was on the collective minds of the editor community, so a couple of weeks ago, we asked editors to submit their questions about DMOZ. The response was fantastic. We appreciate the thoughtful, insightful questions we received and we're very pleased to be able to answer a few of them here. We've tried to select the ones that would be most representative of the public's questions about the ODP. So without further ado, let's get started!

Who makes up the DMOZ audience?
According to comScore (a company that measures internet audience), DMOZ received about 29,000 unique visitors per day in August 2008. About 60% of visitors were young adults 18-24 years old, and slightly more than half were male.

As we've noted in the past, this is an incredibly international audience. In August, we had visitors from six continents and countries ranging from tiny islands and municipalities (Palau and Vatican City) to large countries with growing markets (India and China).

Does AOL plan to use the international DMOZ data?
The short answer is yes. We know that there is a demand for DMOZ from around the world. There are 78 languages other than English represented in the directory and, thanks to the hard work and dedication of our editors, many of these are quite extensive and well-developed. We are actively looking at ways in which we can better incorporate this resource into properties world-wide.

What does AOL have planned for DMOZ in the near future?
While it's not quite ready for its prime-time debut, we can tell you that we're actively working on an all-new DMOZ that incorporates an updated UI and an overhauled back-end infrastructure. Stay tuned for more updates as we get closer to launch!

- emi1y