What are Blogs good for if not comments and discussion . Yes , that is a thought … I have blogged about personal musings , php scripts, open source and commercial applications such as Wordpress, vBulletin, Magento , my life as a Dmoz editor, my web development company and it’s clients and sometimes even SEO. All this time, I have not written just for making sure i get pageviews, even though I do like to get client queries. But I typically don’t have time to write for every damn thing on the internet .

But sometimes, it does make you feel that talking to yourself alone does not justify writing – I wont deny that. Battling with that frame of mind against being stuck moderating thousands of junk posts every day – i used to keep all comments in the typical Wordpress scenario . But I want to give this DoFollow idea a try.  I don’t know wether this will incite more people to initiate a discussion or dialogue , wether my musings are more boring or wether this will bring only incerasing amount of viagra and casino commenters.

But it is fixed that I have made this Blog a DoFollow blog as long as it makes sense.

Being a webmaster , personally … I feel a lot of other webmasters can actively help in the Open Directory Project , instead of constantly venting about the difficulty in submission , acceptance . I have also been able to harness a good amount of utility / benefit while being a voluntary editor and have recently been invited to share them on the Official Dmoz Blog .

OK , so I am somewhat happy , that I got accepted by the Boss if you know me , you would ask that I don’t work for someone , I am my own boss … so who is it that Boss and what did he accept me for, right ?

Well , I do work also as a volunteer editor on the Open Directory Project . Almost an year ago i joined under a small category and I have been learning the ropes . It’s been a informative ride mostly , save few incidents which has confused me recently in Regional/ . I like working in regional , as it helps me build up the categories with sites of local business and organizations, events and public / government utilities or important ones such as Education.

But in order to diversify my interests , I have also applied for a topical category recently . And in most occasions I have been accepted by my superiors ( Metas ) as being ready for handling more sites and categories and thus encouraged . The last category I applied for was interestingly accepted by the Dmoz Editor -in-Chief ( rdkeating25 ) – thus the Boss :p . To be frank , I was of the opinion ( from forum threads ) , that he is usually dormant / inactive in day to day operations of the directory . But maybe that is not true for all days .

You will however find him more in the new and Official Dmoz Blog – which is currently being regularly updated .

DMOZ is the original Open Directory Project, one of the oldest and most reputed directories on the internet. Along with BOTW , Yahoo Directory and Business.com , if anyone serious in getting exposure and enlistment in their topic – it is the directory to be in . Numerous seo tools use a listing in DMOZ as a criteria for evaluating a website’s value. Since it’s inception as an Open Directory Project – meaning contribution can be provided by anyone with an interest and time and energy to devote, DMOZ has kept on enlarging and diversifying into various countries and languages .

However in the past – because of its basic slowness and often inactivity among volunteers , it has become the point of anger for numerous webmasters . People often read about horror stories of not getting listed for months and years , people also hear stories about corrupt DMOZ editors – who allegedly or maybe even truly taken bribes for enlisting websites. DMOZ , like WIkipedia , is not operated by a single group of people ( as far as my knowledge goes) , rather from different ends of the Internet – thus demystifying all the theories and stories might not be possible , but to come somewhat closer to its active audience – they had opened a Public Forum . It did serve some purpose and i believe several actual rules and guidelines are better explained in there , as I was just visiting it . But since past 2 years they closed down the DMOZ Site Submission Status forum , which once again angered many a people . On visiting it today I found out that AOL staff governing DMOZ has initiated a Official DMOZ Blog . Undoubtedly this is another step in having a more public face for the ODP , keeping with the current day trends for every well known websites as well. But it remains to be seen if this will become another bloodbath between the Editors and the Webmasters and also die a unnatural death like the forum. Be as it may , I am still planning to subscribe to it’s RSS feed to stay updated .