The new website, Yellowpagesoptout.com, allows people to select which phone directories they receive, or stop deliveries entirely.

"Our industry is taking a giant leap forward today by launching a clearinghouse site for consumers to control the delivery of directories," said Neg Norton, president, YPA.

"The site, supported by directory publishers across the country, illustrates our ongoing commitment to not delivering a directory to someone who doesn’t want one."

Features of Yellowpagesoptout include:

*Images of directory front covers and information about deliveries, so people can decide which directories to include in an opt-out request.

*An email confirmation about the users’ selections.
 

A few samples of comments we received about this:

"I have actually personally heard from someone who has bribed the editors multiple times to get listed with great-quick results."

1) It does not accurately include even a representative subset of the wealth of quality information on the Web
2) Allegations of corruption
3) Lethargy and languorous posting policies and procedures then DMOZ would disappear overnight."

Former Editor’s Take on the Corruption

M.J. Taylor, who is a moderator in our WebProWorld forum says she used to be a DMOZ editor. She addressed such corruption in a thread, and being how this is such a popular topic of discussion for our readers, I thought her two cents would be worth sharing here as well. She writes:

I can tell you why some websites got nixed in my categories. Sites that were very low quality, perhaps still under construction, for example, didn’t get listed. Sites that were second sites for the same business didn’t get listed. Affiliate sites were deleted.

Editors were very closely watched. I really find all the tales of corruption to be far fetched, as there was a great deal of supervision by very suspicious superior editors. I’m not saying there wasn’t corruption; I’m saying it got caught quickly.

Taylor says she was an editor for a few years and understands a little of the inside workings. For this reason, she says, maybe she finds it "easier to relax" because she knows "it isn’t personal."

What do you think? Comment here, or join the conversation at WebProWorld.

Dmoz has been brought back into the discussion as Google’s Matt Cutts appeared in a new Google Webmaster Help Video answering the following user question:

Why is Google still taking notice of DMOZ? Many have alleged that the editors are corrupt. It’s impossible to get them to list a site even if it is very relevant to a specific area.

"I know that people do have complaints about Dmoz, and we don’t show it in our one-Google-sort of tabs at the top of the page like we used to in previous years, but in some countries, it can be very hard to type in queries. It can take a lot of time," says Cutts. "For example in something like Chinese or Japanese or Korean, sometimes it might be easier to browse by clicking, rather than typing in the query, and so especially in those sorts of countries, it can be very helpful to show Dmoz."

"But we don’t use Dmoz in a lot of the ways that we used to. We don’t show the Dmoz categories or the Open Directory categories beneath the snippet, and we used to do that," he adds. "We don’t show it on the main page like we used to anymore. So if you’re frustrated, you can always try a different category that you also think is relevant. You can always go to editors up the chain. But in general, if you can’t get into Dmoz, I wouldn’t necessarily worry about it. There are a lot of other great places to get links across the web."

Dmoz continues down the slope it’s been on for quite some time in terms of unique visitors. Google not giving it as much play certainly must play at least some role in this. It does get over 18% of its referrals from Google:

Dmoz on its Own Future

Dmoz swears it still has plenty of life left in it, so if you believe the editorial department, there may be new opportunities from Dmoz down the road. In a post earlier this year, reflecting upon the last decade, Bob Keating, Dmoz editor-in-chief said, "Over the ’00 decade, DMOZ has grown to be one of the most successful collaborative projects on the web. It has outlasted its commercial counterparts, and continues to be relevant in the search industry. The keys to its longevity and usefulness are its dedicated community, its open, collaborative editorial model, its non-commercial nature, and open data distribution channel."

"While DMOZ receives hundreds of editor applications, and lists thousands of websites each week, it needs a new Plan – a new blueprint for the future of how the web is organized, and how human organized data is consumed," he says. "Using traditional web directories as a means for information discovery is a thing of the past. However, the need for organized web-based content continues to grow exponentially. The future of DMOZ does not lie merely in improving its toolset, making it more SEO friendly, or convincing others of its collective brilliance. Its future lies in turning the entire thing on its head."

Keating went on to list some goals for this decade, including the development of an API for Dmoz data to allow editors and developers to write new apps using it. He also wants to transform Dmoz from a fixed-path directory to "the largest faceted system for organizing information on the web," have it become a "major influencer" for bringing the semantic web out of the lab/enterprise and into the entire web, and transforming Dmoz into a "suite of products with multiple levels of participation and engagement."

Things have been pretty quiet on the Dmoz front since then. The only updates on the Dmoz blog have been from editors talking about their experiences editing specific categories. Perhaps that is because some of the aforementioned goals are in the process of being realized behind the scenes.

Note: With a great deal of talk in the comments about corrruption, you may be interested in hearing from a former editor on the topic. Read here.

Do you think Dmoz has a place in the future of the web? In the future of search? What kinds of apps would you like to see built upon a Dmoz API? Share your thoughts in the comments.

The reason Mozilla says it decided to start this directory is simply because there isn’t one like it. "There’s no central index of these tools," the company says in a blog post.

"As we’ve explored different tools we could create here as part of the Developer Tools Lab, we’ve come to the opinion that in addition to creating new tools, one of the best things we could do is help developers understand the broad universe of tools that already exist and expose some of the fantastic and amazing work that’s being done," says Mozilla’s Ben Galbraith of the Developer Tools Team.

With the Open Web Tools Directory, you can search through the following categories:

- Design
- Code
- Debug
- Test
- Deploy
- Docs

To view the directory, a modern browser with canvas is required. Galbraith suggests Firefox 3.5, Safari 4, Chrome 2, or Opera 9.

Of course to truly build a comprehensive directory of open web tools, Mozilla needs help from developers, and is calling for submissions. Submissions will be reviewed on a regular basis. They will not go live immediately.

The directory is clearly a work in progress, not just in terms of its contents, but also interface. Mozilla says it is working to add social elements that will allow users to comment and vote on the tools they like best. They are also working on a more accessible version that does not require a browser with canvas support.

The first question is:

Will Google consider Yahoo! Directory and BOTW (Best of the Web) as sources of paid links? If no, why is this different from another site that sells links?

When Google looks at whether or not a directory is useful to users, Google looks at: 

- What is the value-add?

- Do they go out and find entries on their own or do they only wait for people to come to them?

- How much do they charge?

- What is the editorial service that’s being charged?

"If a directory takes $50 and every single person who ever applies in the directory automatically gets in for that $50, there’s not as much editorial oversight as something like the Yahoo! Directory, where people do get rejected,"  says Cutts. "So if there is no editorial value-add there, then that is much closer to paid links."

The second question is:

We sell a software product, and there are 100s of software download directories on the web of varying quality. Could submitting our product to all of them hurt our rankings or domain trust/authority?

Answering this question, Cutts makes it clear that they are only talking about a software product ( .exe file), and not a website. "If it’s only a software product, then I wouldn’t really worry about it," he says. It wouldn’t hurt your website to have a link from those directories, he says.

If the directories are low quality, Google tries not to score them highly, but it doesn’t hurt to have your software listed in them.

There is a new feature on search results pages that shows any categories that might match your search terms. This is designed to make it easier to find profiles you are interested in, as well as let you see if there is a category that matches your interests without needing to scan the entire list of categories on the "All Categories" page. This will make Twellow easier to use and understand for a lot of people.

"This is something internally we’ve been wanting for a while, and Twellow users have also been asking for it. It really helps people see the bigger picture of Twellow when searching by pointing out other possible avenues for finding people," says Twellow Lead Developer Matthew Daines.

Twellow now has over a thousand different categories available for browsing and searching. What this means for Twitterers is that they have a great resource for finding Twitterers related to topics they are interested in. This makes Twitter more useful in my opinion, when you look at it from the "microblogging" perspective – meaning you’re reading tweets for information as you would blogs.

The Twellow team is always adding new categories. A good way to keep up with what has been added is to follow Twellow on Twitter, where the new categories are regularly mentioned. If there is a category you would like to see in Twellow, but it not there, you can simply contact the team, and there is a good chance they will add it. Twellow makes Twitter more useful, and I promise, I’m not just saying that because it’s a WebProNews service.