Good day to all, I'm a long time viewer now a member and I'm glad to have found this knowledge bowl. Now my first question. When you say " Find a good category set with more than 1000 categories" what is that?
Just got through the thread... And, all I can say is that directories, and other turnkey websites are growing like mushrooms after rain these days. Yeah, you can have your own directory / proxy / myspace resource / you name it website in a mather of hours, but what afterwards? What makes a quality web directory, and what separates it from a link farm? Time & Quality. I run a Website, over 2 years old now, today had more than 600 websites for review... Its hard work, really... Personaly, I make a difference between a website on one side, and a Website on the other. The same is with directories and Directories. To sum it up, time will tell which one has a bigger letter at the begining of its name, and quality will make it stay that way.
1 day should be more than enough if you have the right tools. Buy the script, create categories, fix templates, dump in all the links. You are done!
Does it matter if your directory is a directory.com or directory.co.uk, directory.com.au etc etc? Are you ranked higher for .com?
It does matter, if you want to target a certain country. Use the tld of a country and you will rank a little higher for searches from that country, and slightly lower for searches from other countries. So if you want traffic from all over, get a .com.