AOL/Dmoz is now listening to webmasters. Yay?

I decided to do my tri-annual visit to the official Dmoz blog today (http://blog.dmoz.org/) and came into a bit of a surprise posting: AOL is actually fielding questions from the general public and webmaster community. Yay! I'm very excited about this. There's nothing more encouraging than to know that your voice is being heard, even if your suggestions aren't acted on. I applaud AOL for doing this and for trying to open the door of transparency. http://blog.dmoz.org/2009/02/27/have-questions-about-dmoz-let-us-know/

As an editor, I have always thought Dmoz should open the doors of communication with those who submit their sites to the directory. In a way, they do make my life easier as an editor because that means I don't have to spend hours wading through spammy search engine results to find good sites to list because those good sites are already being suggested by their webmasters and owners. I think it would be a great idea for Dmoz to at least provide status checks for those who request it. Although, I'm not sure how this would work. Maybe after submitting a site the submitter is given a reference number that he can enter somewhere on the site and it will give him the status: waiting/deleted/added. Sure, I can see the concern, and even anger, of those who find out that their site is deleted. Maybe they'll direct their anger at the resource-zone.com, hahahah.

Yes, you'll hear individual editors say Dmoz doesn't provide status checks and the resource-zone.com tried it and it was found to be worthless information and a waste of time, and more blah blah. Well, only AOL can make that decision regarding the ODP. Personally, I wouldn't mind something where after I've reviewed a site I will have the choice to send feedback to the e-mail address submitted with the site, something along the lines of added/deleted/moved to another category for review and, if I choose, I have the choice to leave personalized comments.

Whatever the outcome of this initiation by AOL to get general public and webmaster feedback and try to be more transparent is a step in the right direction and I welcome it. Wherever it goes from here is yet to be seen. Even if AOL cannot act on most of the requests I applaud the effort to actually listen to the concerns of webmasters. Hooray for AOL!

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