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Python modules in the Open Directory Project

Gerhard Häring gh_pythonlist at gmx.de
Sat Oct 6 04:05:45 EDT 2001 
This might not be news for many of you, but for the rest, I think it's
good news :-)

Since a few months, I'm an editor at the Open Directory Project
(http://www.dmoz.org). I you don't have any idea what this is, here's a
short summary from the about page:

    The Open Directory Project (ODP) is the most comprehensive human
    edited directory of the Web, compiled by a vast global community of
    volunteer editors.

    The ODP powers core directory services for some the most popular
    portals and search engines on the Web, including AOL Search,
    Netscape Search, Google, Lycos, DirectHit, and HotBot, and hundreds
    of others. 

    The ODP is 100% free.  There is no cost to submit a site or to use
    our data.  Anyone can download and use ODP data at no cost provided
    they comply with the ODP's free license agreement and attribution.
    Also, there is no cost associated with listing and submitting sites. 

Specifically, I maintain this category:

    http://dmoz.org/Computers/Programming/Languages/Python/Modules/

It's already quite comprehensive, it contains 105 entries, of which 27
are in the Database subcategory alone. I think it's become quite useful.
Of course there's always room for improvement, for example I have only
recently begun to create more subcategories. The entire Python category
is quite useful, IMHO.

I think you can see from the summary why dmoz.org is an important site:
almost all search engines use its data for their directories and also
for weighting their search results. I'm also pretty sure that sites that
are listed in dmoz.org get more "importance factor" in regular searches.
To see that they really use the directory data 1:1 (via RDF dump), you
can compare these two sites:

    http://dmoz.org/Computers/Programming/Languages/Python/Modules/
    http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Programming/Languages/Python/Modules/

If you want a site listed at dmoz.org, you can simply go to the
appropriate subcategory and click "Add URL". So if you have a Python
site that you'd like listed, by all means go there and submit it. Of
course you can also submit commercial sites. That's the best and
cheapest advertisement you can get for your Python modules, articles,
tools and Python-related commercial-products :-))

Gerhard
-- 
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