Monthly Archives: November 2006

What Really Happened to DMOZ

As some of you may have noticed, submitting a site to DMOZ has been impossible for almost a month, apparently since October 23rd. The world’s biggest human-edited directory’s servers crashed, and all the pages that you’re able to see right now are static pages coming from their backup.

There’s also another reason behind DMOZ outage. Jean Manco, who is a DMOZ editor and also a member of Cre8asiteforums revealed something interesting in this thread:

There was a crash. The public side was recovered fairly easily. (It’s just a static copy though.) The real problem has been with the innards – the editing side. Don’t ask me what exactly went wrong. But it was catastrophic. Editors haven’t been able to edit at all since it happened.

The silver lining is that the new set-up that AOL has been working on in the wake of the crash should be an improvement. And we hope to see it in action fairly soon. I can’t give an estimated time for lift-off though. Nor can I promise that submissions will be switched back on as soon as editors can get back to work. There may be technical reasons for a time-lag on that.

Well, it’s good to hear that there is a serious reason behind this outage, but even if DMOZ goes back up tomorrow, we will still have to wait a year or two before seeing our sites listed! 🙂

The End of Microsoft bCentral Directory

If you try to submit your website to Microsoft bCentral Small Business Directory, you’ll get a message that may disappoint you:

As of November 15, 2006 Microsoft will no longer accept new sign-ups for select Microsoft Online Small Business Services. These services, previously marketed under the bCentral™ brand, include Appointment Manager, Banner Network Ads, Commerce Manager, Customer Manager, FastCounter Pro, List Builder, Sales Leads, SharePoint®, Submit it!, Traffic Builder, and Web Hosting Packages.

Unfortunately, they no longer accept submissions to their directory. As Andy Beal rightly noticed, the new home for Microsoft Small Business Services doesn’t appear to have a directory.

In the mean time, DMOZ has been unavailable for more than a month now… Could it be the end of human edited directories?

Danny Sullivan To Launch New SEO Blog

I just heard that Danny Sullivan is about to launch his own SEO Blog called Search Engine Land. He’ll team up with his buddies Chris Sherman and Barry Schwartz to provide information about the search marketing industry. The blog will officially launch december 11th and you can already know what you’ll get once it’s up and running:

  • Original content covering developments in the search space.
  • Daily blog posts covering search news from across the web.
  • SearchCap: A daily email newsletter recapping search news from Search Engine Land and across the web. Also available by feed.
  • SearchCap Monthly: A monthly email newsletter recapping search news over the past month. Also available by feed.
  • A fresh, clean look — complete with logo. What you see here is NOT how the site will look December 11!

I look forward to reading his new blog and I’m sure him, Barry, and Chris will keep us entertained.

Text Link Ads Acquired by MediaWhiz, Offering New Services

Today, the famous text link advertising company Text Link Ads announced that it has been acquired by MediaWhiz. According to TLA owner, Patrick Gavin, this change will allow advertisers to have new ways to drive traffic and sales thanks to email marketing, CPA offers, CPM displays ads etc.

For happy publishers like me :), it means more potential advertisers and new ways to make money!

I’ve been providing text links through this blog and I’m quite happy with the revenue I got. If you have a website and want an easy and quick way to make money, you should check out their offers.

Research Beyond Google

Many people don’t really realize it, but only a small part of the world information is indexed in Google. Furthermore, people start realizing that some of the results displayed in the search engines’ results do not always satisfy them.

For those of you who want to go deeper when searching, the Online Education Database (OEDb) has gathered a list of 119 of specialty search engines to search Art, Businesses, Jobs, Politics, Science or Health information. The list includes useful and comprehensive resources that you might have used in the past but that you stopped using since Google came up.