I have recently been accepted as an editor, for a small category, in the Open Directory Project, a project which was/is important but has become increasingly obscure.

The project was established in 1998 listing and categorising websites in a taxonomy, whilst making data relatively freely available. The project might seem dull, but it is very useful and separates spam websites from genuine websites. Many search engines use the descriptions of websites given by DMOZ editors, as they are much better and less biased than those the websites themselves provide.

In 1998, Netscape acquired the site (so it now belongs to Time Warner) but all data is (currently) freely available and can be hosted anywhere. Google maintain a mirror of the project.

The website is pretty hard to get to grips with and really isn’t very Web 2.0 at all, in fact is is one of the few remnants of Web 1.0 which hasn’t tried to change. I still find it an amazing project, perhaps because it feels as though it was designed for the Netscape Navigator-era of Internet history.

The site currently has 4,581,316 sites, 81,586 editors and nearly 600,000 categories. The project lists more websites than Wikipedia has articles.

It is a fascinating site. You should submit your site if you haven’t (good for SEO) and volunteer to edit if you’re interested in a category.