Vertical Directories...How Will They Change?

My friend Brad runs a good number of vertical directories and wonders how they will change going forward.

I think over time the directories that are
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will continue to erode in significance.

Using link info link info is a hard setup to display the personality of the site owner unless there is also some editorial information portion of the page or site. With the low cost of publishing information (or misinformation) and well over half the web being for profit spam it is hard to trust anything.

If a site is without personality it may as well be created algorithmically.

Yet when a single person has to do everything it can become easy to burn out. How do you create social incentives to make others want to build your site / network while still preserving the quality of the content?

One area where I really feel like I am cheating myself, and the readers of my book or this site is that I have not created any communities from scratch or tapped the user driven content market yet.

The lone wolf blog with a personal voice getting a few random comments here and there is cool, but those who can create software or social systems that others inherantly want to work with will do far better than the average blogger like me.