Yes - I was in college, and I had been thinking about applying to the ODP for a few days. At this point, I had no idea exactly what the ODP was about, except that it was about adding links into categories. Eventually, I submitted an application to become editor of what was then Computers/Emulators/Targets/Acorn_Archimedes (now Computers/Emulators/Acorn/Archimedes), as I used to own an Archimedes (an A3000, if you're interested), and I'm interested in emulators for it. I can't remember what I said in my original application, though.

Yes - and what's more, within the same day that I applied. :) Even back then, that was unusually quick - it even surprised me, because I thought that they must be really backlogged.

I made my first forum post two days later. Of course, I immediately did the wrong thing and used 'New Editor' for the subject. D'oh!

Annoyingly, no, I didn't keep my welcome letter. It was on a Hotmail account, and because I'm a lazy bum who doesn't clean out email messages in Hotmail, instead just letting it do it itself, it automatically deleted it after the account became too full. However, I can still remember the moment I saw it - it was pretty exciting for me. And this was even without knowing that ODP's data is used by search engines like Google. I just thought it was a good way to give back to the Internet after having taken so much from it. :) [ed: said welcome e-mail has since been located]

I guess right now I'm more of a 'behind the scenes' person. However, I still do 'real' editing in the main ODP. It's also worth mentioning that 3 of my 9 Test categories have me listed as editor so that certain tools will work - including the Greenbusters tool.

Well, the second category you mentioned (about the Queen Mother) is already in the directory (at Regional/Europe/United_Kingdom/England/Society_and_Culture/History/Kings_and_Queens/Windsor/Elizabeth_-_Queen_Mother), and seems to be doing very well. The other category is still in Test, in my Test/ODP/Editors/C/ciaran category. I do not know if it will eventually become part of the main directory or not - the main reason it was created is because of its proximity to September 11th, and as a result more sites were created about the topic than you might normally expect. However, it turned out to be co-incidental.

Thanks for the compliment. :-D My programming work in real life is based at a company called Delvestream Systems Ltd. I do my work at work, and my ODP editing at home, so they go quite well. :) After all, I'm sure nobody at ODP would be naughty enough to edit at work, would they? ;-)

At the moment, I'm not working on any new tools, but I do have some ideas. I think the coolest tool I've created is probably the List Cat Dates tool. It certainly seems to get a lot of attention from people.

I'm 19 years old; 20 in June. :) I agree, a lot of the people in ODP seem to be teens, and that's no bad thing. More power to us, I say. :-D BTW, for people who have opted to have their age revealed (like me), you can find their age using the ODP Editors Information Database, which is very useful... and intriguing. :)

I think it's great. It's both useful and fun at the same time, and can help new editors overcome their fears by chatting to metas live. :)

I can't say that it overly helped through my time here, but it certainly didn't hinder. And in many cases, #odp is great if you come across an URL that you don't know what to do with - you can post the URL in the chat and get near-instant feedback on what people think. That makes for fast editing, especially when you don't want to go to the forums just for one URL. :)

Well, as you may know, recently I haven't been editing a lot in the ODP. However, I'm now beginning to take an interest again, and this time I'm going to concentrate on the Computers tree, as that's really where my main interests lie. In the future, I hope to become a CatMod for that tree, but that's probably some way off yet. :)

Sure. The first thing you should probably know is that I actually wrote the code behind that journal myself. I couldn't get an account creation code for LiveJournal (which is what I originally wanted), so I got fed up of waiting and made my own system. And I actually think that it's better this way - I'm not limited by the program, because if I want to do something that the program doesn't do, I can just change the code so it will. :)

My journal details my thoughts and feelings. I generally try to update at least every few days, so keep checking back on it. :) As I'm a Christian, quite a few of the posts there will probably have some thoughts on my Christianity, God, and basically how great God is. That's not to say that that's the only thing I rattle on about; easiest way to find out is to take a visit and see. :)

You may also be interested to hear that I recently registered my own domain name - theblob.org. I have no idea what I'm going to put there yet, but I'm working on it. ;-)

Not really, at least not at the moment. Some day I might go to university and get a degree, but it's not foremost in my mind at the moment. :)