As described in another post, I built a tool that will display categories that show signs of life in the DMOZ/ODP directory. If you are going to do a DMOZ submission you might want to use this to help decide which category submit to. Will this help you with your chances to get a DMOZ listing? It may. Will it hurt DMOZ? Only if you submit to the wrong place but they can just delete or move you. Use it wisely, use it well and report back if it helps. http://www.salarymap.com/dmoz-directory-submission-listing-tool/
wow great tool, very interesting results for active editors in world/hrvatski few niches and commercial categories, everything else is dead...
The results seem to be buggy - I typed in "hotels" and looked at the first few entries - they were not edited on 8/21/2007 as the output from your tool claims (I suspect 8/21/2007 was the date when your tool retrieved the category page.) As I mentioned in the other thread, the date from the structure.rdf.u8.gz file is a much more reliable source if you want to know when a category had last changed. Also, the output says "(updated 8/21/2007 by editorname)" (where editorname apparently is the editor listed for the category, judging from looking at the first few entries). Only, it's a pretty unreliable assumption that the last edit in a category was made by the editor listed in the category.
You are correct, that is the date of retrieval. There are several steps I went through after data collection to populate the database. I pulled down a copy of that file but it would take me a bit of work to handle such a huge file. They really should set up a web service rather than using download files. I will probably reword that. It's not intended to be a precise predictor of future edits. If we could do an A-B test I would think categories recently edited would show a much better success in listing than those showing no activity. I am only trying to help sites get listed rather than have them submitted to unmaintained categories.
It's not easily available but their is a log. Surprisingly it's almost adult free. I always suspected that was an exaggerated part of web business.
Thanks for blog post. It was kinda fun to make and it might help reduce the "I submitted to DMOZ before Google was even founded and I am wondering how long it will take to get listed" posts.