I kinda wish there was a sort of proper blog-DMOZ. Would make this sort of stuff a lot easier. Right now everyone and their grandma is curating their own blog list. Lots of wasted effort that could be saved by collaborating somehow.
I agree but it’s incredibly hard to collaborate on this kind of projects because everyone has their own take on what should and shouldn’t be included.
Curation is still hard. Also, I personally don’t mind having different curated directories because those will reflect the taste and interests of the curator.
I figure collaborate on answering the easy questions, is the website online, is it chock full of spam, is it a blog about horses or about keyboards, etc. Some of that could be automated (like onlineness, large change detection, etc.), but some of it needs manual supervision.
Right now everyone who is running any sort of curated discovery service needs to answer these same questions about roughly the same site.
ooh.directory gained some traction a few month ago [0] - and they are steadily adding blogs although they do it slowly. Manually reviewing and trying to have some diversity is no easy task.
Because curation to keep spam out would be work. And how do you prevent trojan horses, where an initially promising blog is turned over to SEO once included in the official dmoz?
There’s also the issue of quality. Do you just include everything that is a blog, no matter how low quality it is?
And if the answer to that is no, then where do you draw the line when it comes to quality?
Curating anything is complicated and different people will have different opinions which is why you end up with different lists curated by different groups of people with different ideas about what should and shouldn’t be included.
So happy so see the small, independent and more humane web being highlighted.
I’m trying to do my part[0] but I have no doubt that a search engine—even if still a niche one— can have a much bigger impact.
Really well done Vlad!
[0] https://peopleandblogs.com