*** It is become an outdated harem of rogue & corrupted editors. ***

People keep repeating this, but editors that aren't following the editing guidelines are pushed out the door. You often see them pop up at Digital Point claiming they had no idea they were doing wrong and had no warning. However, I have seen ex-editors that have argued with other editors for several months before being pushed; so their claim of "no idea" is false. There is a "report abuse" form. Fill it in and it will be looked at, and problems taken care of.

*** bloggers have been exposing the ‘volunteer’ editors of their directory for extortion and charging site owners to approve their listings in the super valuable directory. ***

That story has already been debunked as link-bait. http://sphinn.com/story/3897#c5849 . There was no site to be removed and therefore no extortion. http://blogoscoped.com/forum/106601.html#id106669 . How can someone that has known since 2005 that they are banned, be threatened with any sort of removal two years later ? It didn't happen.

*** It was also noted over the weekend that a search for ‘DMOZ’ on Google did not show the Netscape Open Directory Project in its results. ***

Again, you must have read what I wrote here and what Matt Cutts wrote. It is a simple canonical URL issue, which has been fixed. http://sphinn.com/story/6594 and http://www.seomoz.org/blog/what-makes-a-good-web-directory-and-why-google-penalized-dozens-of-bad-ones#jtc35658 Having been involved in the canonicalisation of sites ranging from a few dozen pages to several million pages, I am very familiar with the issues. I have been writing about those for many years. You can try to get some sensationalist "ODP banned" story out of it, but you would be wrong. The http://www.google.com/search?num=100&q=site%3Acore-n02.dmoz.aol.com+-inurl:chefmoz search catches you out.

*** something that probably had site owners and directory editors cringing at the possibility of a change in DMOZ rankings. ***

I would guess that 98% of editors were actually totally unaware that anything had changed. Those that did notice pinged the AOL techs and then let them get on with their jobs. With all the hardware changes and changes to canonicalisation across www and non-www URLs on at least four domains, something was bound to go wrong or have unintended consequences. Several people were casually on the lookout for issues just as anyone would with a community site that they participate in. Someone, not necessarily Staff, would report in here if there was a major problem with Sphinn, for example. Google was back on course indexing the ODP under the correct URLs within just a couple of days. AOL Staff already addressed that on the DMOZ Blog  too http://blog.dmoz.org/2007/09/26/the-search-for-dmoz/ .

*** The mix of issues surrounding DMOZ may of (sic) awakened a sleeping giant at AOL ***

The new staff have been around for several months. Just because you have noticed change now, does not make you observant. You have missed much that has already happened in recent months, and there is a lot more to come.

q1smd : The Google ranking rumor and negative buzz for DMOZ was enough for them to address it on their blog, which is my point. If the bad buzz around it was enough for them to go a launch a blog to tackle public relations, it's a step in the right direction : http://blog.dmoz.org/2007/09/26/the-search-for-dmoz/

Again, the Shoemoney post may have been bait, but the person trying to extort Jeremy was associated with DMOZ in the realm of once being an editor for them. If someone who worked for the cable company but was fired two years agi, appears at your door with his uniform, ID and other cable company stuff, trying to get you to pay your bill in cash, wouldn't you expect someone, somewhere to fall for it? Say it makes the evening news, it's still bad press for the cable company because of negative association.

Yes, DMOZ has been sleeping for years. Good that things have happened or will be happening. I didn't claim to be all observant in the post, so why are you dogging it? If anything, I'm helping to spread the word that DMOZ is taking the steps to open communication with the rest of the world. 5 years too late.

*** The Google ranking rumor and negative buzz for DMOZ was enough for them to address it on their blog, ***

The blog had already been planned for several months, along with a myriad of other things, some of which have already been done, some of which are in process at the moment, and some of which are still only at the discussion stage. The blog is just the right place to let people know that the ODP wasn't banned.  However, Matt Cutts had already confirmed that fact by posting in here, and elsewhere. There are still new blog posts, going out today, claiming they are banned when the SERPs say otherwise. I guess that untruth will continue to circulate for months now.

*** but the person trying to extort Jeremy was associated with DMOZ in the realm of once being an editor for them. ***

I am going to repeat this again. There was no site to be removed from the ODP. They were already banned from ever being listed. They were banned in 2005 for trying to bribe editors to list them. There was no attempted extortion because the supposed email never existed.

If the real goal is to provide a valuable resource to the web public at large, taking Wiki's nofollow appraoch would solve an awful lot of problems real fast.. It would make selling those links worthless, and it would slow down the bulk of the spam submissions..

For the matter, taking down the submission page itself would stop itall together since we keep hearing over and over and over that very few editors even look at the submission queues..

He did say that, at first, in http://sphinn.com/story/6594  

However, I asked if he was mistaken, and had perhaps been looking at the wrong URL (perhaps the .com domain). There had been no evidence that we had seen of any sort of redirect from www.dmoz.org to www.dmoz.org and lots of people had checked that, multiple times.

Matt later came back and said ""I only did a cursory dig (earlier) and that's what it looked like at that point. I've been asking about it more, and it looks like dmoz's 301 might have interacted badly with a heuristic on Google's side.""

So, now it's down to a "heuristic". That could mean anything to the uninitiated. However, I have several ideas about that, especially knowing what I do about exactly which domains were previously indexed, and how and when the redirects were applied, and then how each domain's indexing changed in Google SERPs over the last month or so.

Additionally, this loophole wasn't exactly helping any:   http://www.google.com/search?num=100&q=site%3Acore-n02.dmoz.aol.com+-inurl:chefmoz but that one has now also been fixed.

From a researcher angle,

make use of non-commerical general knowledge directories of sites, quality over quantity and overseen by professors, librarians and other experts.

Examples:
http://www.intutue.ac.uk, http://www.ipl.org, http://www.lii.org, http://infomine.ucr.edu

Subject specific expert built directories are also available.

One example for business:
http://globaledge.msu.edu