Promoting the ODP
by angela45

The idea of promoting the ODP is not a new one, but has been around since at least 27th September, 2000. This topic has been discussed in several forum threads over the years. Why do people feel concerned about this issue? One reason is to encourage submissions by webmasters. The web is constantly changing and developing and the more submissions we get, the less we have to out and find the new pages to keep the ODP more up to date. We also need more active editors to keep up with the submission levels, adding new sites, participating in category reorganizations, and cleaning up current titles and descriptons.

According to dlugan's Gauntlets (requires sign up to access), when I last checked, our current rate of unreviewed to reviewed sites is 31% with a growth rate of about .9%. Now, .9% doesn't sound like much, but the unreviewed total is about 110274 and .9% is about 9902. I'm not sure of the time frame for the growth rate. It has been estimated that there are about 3000 to 5000 active editors. I don't know what they define as active, but let's double that and say that there are 10,000 active editors. Well, if wanted to clear up all the unreviewed today, every single active editor would have to review 110 webpages. That's just nearly impossible. What compounds the situation is that submitters check to see if there site is there and not find it and resubmit the site, adding to the unreviewed. If we increase the number of active editors, which log in and edit at least once a month, we'd be making some substantial progress in working on the Open Directory Project. Adding more active editors isn't the only solution, but it is a major one.

Some ideas to make this come about have been discussed in the forums. There are many solutions to this. One is for editors to voluntarily add a promotion or information about ODP in their profile. This would really help, since ODP editors' profiles are listed in every search engine that I have ever used. I mean these profiles are really picked up. Great place to put a resume. But, I digress. :) Another idea is to add one of Neil's become an editor banners on your webpages. Just include a link back to the ODP or one of the informative pages in the directory.

Here are some banners made by Neil:

GIF Format

And here are some general ODP banners. A variation on that theme is to put the ODP search engine on your webpage. You can do this by going to the Link to ODP page and copying and pasting that onto your webpage.

A couple more suggestions are: post about the ODP in other forums that the editor belongs to, and sign guestbooks with a link back to the ODP.

There are some concerns about promoting the ODP, also. They include not to over encourage potential editor candidates that they will become an editor just by filling out the submission page.

There has also been some talk about keeping the good editors that we already have. Editor retention is as important, or more important than, ODP promotion. There were several solutions offered in the latest promoting ODP thread, such as email notification of new editors, a new editor jumpstart help page, expanding the current welcome email to new editors with more helpful links, and online java chat mentors.

Whether you agree or disagree to promoting the ODP, it is certainly worth discussing.

- angela45

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