The drop in PR is only going to affect the link selling/buying whores. Most of my sites went up, but my rant went down to PR1. The rant has done much better in the SERPs though. PR is great for link seller/buyers, but SERPs are much more important for the rest of the webmasters.
so there will be no glory in offering free, no reciprocal directory since google will also consider that a website selling links?
the real backlinks you find in the webmaster tools at google. google show you not all links in the search when you put in link:yourdomain. i think because of the will make it more difficulter to change or buy links.
Come on peeps, there's more to life than worrying about what PR your sites are going to get. A few sites of mine have seen their PR drop slightly or stay the same, but I'm still receiving as much traffic to these sites as I ever have. Also, I have a new site that's obviously been a PR0 for the last few months, and is nowhere to be found in the search engines, but despite this it's still earned me around $7000 so far. I couldn't care less what it's PR is.
I have had: 2 sites stay the same, one went up to 2 from zero and the rest have taken a nose dive, but while I am still ranked 1st for my main keywords I don't mind so much.
No Google likes those. Google loves authority sites and hub sites. A directory is definitely a good hub site as long as it doesn't link to a bunch of bad sites (hackers, cracker, software pirates, etc.)
Before you go by the toolbar, check each DC. The site in my sig is listed as PR 5 on the toolbar, but just got upped to PR 6 in the DCs (the site started in October, so this is only the second PR update for it, cool).