I wish there were more directories. Yeah 90% are crap when it comes to human users, but as has been pointed out: a link is a link is a link. Consider this: What if I offered you 500 links to your existing content in the next 6 hours or promised you an indeterminant number of links in the future when your content was worthwhile? What if I promised you that with one hour of work you could get 50 new links every month for your existing content? Or what if I simply dangled a carrot in front of your nose with the promise that if you just keep building quality content, you'll get links? A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush? 1 hour per month is all it takes. Assuming a 40 hour work week (how many of us only work that??), there are 160 work hours a month. 1 hour is .00625% of your time. Why wouldn't you spend 99.375% of your time chasing that carrot while using .625% of your time gaining 50 new links every month? That being said, I do use directories. I use them to find related sites for link exchanges, cross promotions, etc. Sure, searching Google will find me the most linked to widget sites on the web or the widget sites that have managed to stuff the most keywords on their page, but it won't find me the little mom and pop widget sites without wading through mounds of unrelated crap. A half way decent directory will at least sort the wheat from the chaff.
My only problem with the directories poping now is that they all look the same. Everyone seems to using the same template to build their directories. For the most part I do not see any thing unqiue about all of the new directories coming out. In that sense it makes it hard to find a quality directory worth submitting to. What happened to the good old fashion hand built directories? Seems to me that most of these sites are just trying to make a quick buck and are not in it for the long run. As long as that keeps happening then I think directories will start to be frowned on more and more by the Serps. That's just my op of course.
Very few people have the skill to build one from scratch, and even if you do it can take a while. That's why most who do will make the most of the time they invested by selling it on and/or using it to build other directories.
Yes as someone has said , a link is a link , but i think with time Directories link will hold no value in Google .. it will still be in msn and yahoo though ...
The same thing that happened to all the good old fashioned hand built carts/houses/chairs/bows/clothes/etc. Automation. Why would I spend a couple of weeks or months hand coding a directory when I can install a premade script? Why would I reinvent the wheel?? Any coder worth his salt knows that you build modularly so you can resuse code later. Coders have never been the type to reinvent wheels. True, 90% of the directories are crap, and 99% will never be used by a human to find stuff. But some (especially niche directories) do hold value. I laugh and shake my head when I see a PR-less domain with a default installation of PHPLD selling links for $20. If you want me to buy a link in your directory, you have to at least change the template. However, looking at a directory like my own or Alive, a paid listing makes sense. Directories can also be "repurposed". For example, I used the rss feed from my directory to feed the submission list for a peice of software I wrote called Article Distributor. I have one category (http://after5webdesign.com/directory/Arts/Writers_Resources/Self_Publishing/Article_Dashboard/) that lists a bunch of sites that worked with Article Distributor, and as article ditributor initialized, it grabbed that list. Now, not only are these sites getting the PR from a link in my directory, they are also getting an extra thousand visitors per week from authors submitting articles. Well worth the $5 IMO. Now, I'm not the smartest guy in the world, but I'm pretty sure someone will come up with a similar method of repurposing their directory.