Another Loss of Confidence

Seems I'm not the only one wondering about the whereabouts and welfare of the editors over at DMOZ. The nice folks over at MarketPosition included an article in their last e-mail explaining how to get MSN to update your site description in their search engine.

Of note in the article is this lovely quote: "But what if you've been trying unsuccessfully to get the Open Directory to update your listing?" Should you send a search party? Alert the FBI? Perhaps, but if you want some results, there's a new meta tag that works with MSNbot to update that tired old description.

Author Scott Goodyear closes the article by saying, "We can only hope that other engines will follow MSN's lead."
And there it is, a mass-media scourging of the hard-working, overburdened DMOZ editors, who will soon fear to look upon other Web sites in their fleeting nanoseconds of downtime as the tide of mildly disgruntled Web masters continues to rise.

DMOZ now joins the President, Congress, and our legal system in losing the confidence of the American public. What can we belive in anymore, if we can't trust a group of unpaid volunteers to provide free indexing for multibillion-dollar behemoths like Google and MSN? The very core of the Internet is starting to fail, and I can only hope it doesn't cause a cascade like the Y2K virus almost did. Imagine a world where search engines are forced to use the meta descriptions written by biased, manipulative Web masters instead of the fair and balanced descriptions created by Starbucks-fueled volunteers, whose only mission in life is to point people toward what's relevant and genuine.

Let's hope that this slap from MSN encourages the powers that be at DMOZ, assuming there are any that can be found, to break out the whips and demand 26-hour days from their underperforming editors, because I don't think I could live in a world where DMOZ didn't guarantee those lucky enough to have their submissions actually reviewed an extra point or two of PageRank.

A number of people suggested that I become a DMOZ editor after my last post on this subject. "Just post your site and then resign," was heard more than once. I don't approve of those kinds of shenanigans to begin with, and to me, becoming a DMOZ editor because they won't list your site is like going into the kitchen and getting your own food because you can't find your waitress.