Praise: Rev Documentation to the rescue

[Richard Gaskin]

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