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 khazar has compiled a great history for us. Happy Halloween! - - - - - - - - - - - - What are the little creatures in every DMOZ category? Well, DMOZ was started by Rich Skrenta in 1998, under the name of Newhoo. But in 1999,

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! - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 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.

We recently ran across this screenshot of a very young DMOZ. Do you remember when the site looked like this? It was May of 1999, and the ODP was about a month shy of its first birthday. The directory was teetering on the half-million site mark in 78,000 categories maintained by 10,000 volunteer editors. Fast-forward to June 5, 2003. A five-year-old DMOZ had attained its now-familiar look and feel. The directory's size had grown more than six-fold to 3.

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 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Website owners often complain about the time it takes for the sites they suggest to be listed in the Open Directory Project. Indeed,

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.

For the last several months, I've been reflecting on what the 10th anniversary of DMOZ actually means. DMOZ is fundamentally the same site it was in 1998. In the social media landscape we're the old timer's with wisdom and tons of life lessons learned. But is that to say its day has come and gone? Absolutely not, and I don't just say that because I've spent the last nine of the past ten years keeping house. In part,

Isn't that awesome! We would like to thank to the good folks over at ISEDB.com for the love they sent our way in their post on 'How To Optimize For Google.' A great piece that takes a holistic look at optimizing for search engines and today's this portion spoke to all the types of webmaster tools-including directories that are available. Not that I'm biased, but I think we can all agree that the most exciting take away is that search engines love free,

Our official newsletter was originally posted over on Digital Point , but wanted be certain that everyone gets the chance to take a look. Many, many thanks to those who contributed to the development of the newsletter . And for those curious about what the future holds for DMOZ ... click now to learn more. Great insight from our technical team about what is coming down the road.

Interested in becoming a DMOZ volunteer? Here is another great testimonial from one of our editors in the UK about how they joined and what they've accomplished since. If you have domain expertise, passion for a particular subject and happy to volunteer your time to help create the best directory for that subject...apply! We have more than 590,000 categories in 80 languages and still more than enough room to grow. Here is hiraeth's contribution to the DMOZ Blog.

Anyone here from Equatorial Guinea ? Perhaps Montserrat or the Cook Islands ? Reason why I ask is that the DMOZ team was amazed to see the global reach of our audience. In February, we saw visitors from 200+ "countries" to DMOZ.org. Not a misprint...200+. That's huge! Everything from heavily industrialized nations to protectorates on far reaches of the Earth with populations of less than 1200 people.

The sun never sets on the DMOZ community : ( And it is always great to share the perspective of our members from around the planet. Below is a translated version of a post from the French DMOZ blog ) linked below (. The POV it provides is that of someone passionate about a specific subject and a mini documentary on the sign up process to capture your Moz. Best practices, key resources and thing to keep in mind when applying to become and editor. Along with another key point.

As a follow up to our last post and as a chance to continue allowing our editors the chance to share their experiences with the world at large, here is a post that came to us from a fairly new member of the editorial community. Unlike the previous post about why folks join, this speaks to a perception of DMOZ/ODP as a group of elitist few or a tribe of warring editors. A popular mis-conception that seems to pop up when whenever DMOZ pops up. In fact,

Back in our initial post, we mentioned that this site would serve as a forum for editors to share their stories. Why they joined. What they get out of the experience and why it matters to them. Below is the first of many posts from our editors talking about why they joined the community.

Over the history of the project, DMOZ has had more than 70,000 volunteer editors worldwide. On average, there are approximately 6,000 active editor accounts at any given time. What's impressive )at least to me( is that we do this out of a pure sense of giving back to the Internet Community. Editors take the time to organize and create useful resources in categories and topics that are of interest to us,

As the numerous responses to my first post show, this is one of the most common and controversial questions asked about DMOZ. To answer this question, it is important to consider what DMOZ isn't. DMOZ is not set up as a listing service for site owners. Site submissions are only one source for finding quality sites to add to the directory. Some editors choose to review submissions while other editors might prefer to )at first( find sites on their own through search engines,

Yesterday the internet was all a flutter with reports and wide ranging theories as to why searches for "DMOZ" in Google were not returning the usual results. If you happened to miss those, I've included a couple of examples that can be found here , here , here and here . While these made for great headlines and no shortage of comments and link backs...they were 100% off the mark. Truth is,

Hello and welcome to the new DMOZ blog, the official source for information, insight, and updates about DMOZ , the Open Directory Project ) ODP (. DMOZ is made up of thousands of passionate, volunteer category enthusiasts and experts from all over the world who donate their time to arrange their respective portion of the web. Thanks to their work, DMOZ is a starting place for browsing and searching the web.