Rosalind - 11:24 am on Jul 8, 2008 (gmt 0)

Some of the "directories are dead" information is pure misinformation, and I suspect a lot of it comes from the 90% or so of SEOs who just don't know how to obtain good listings.

Some of this also applies to a manual penalty that Google applied to a number of directories last year. This only affected a tiny percentage of them, many of which were overly crosslinked and may have been perceived as trying to sell pagerank.

Whether it's going to be a waste of your time to build one depends a lot on your niche and your approach, and it really is hard to generalise. That's why I suggest putting up a few link pages, possibly on a subdomain of one of your existing sites. Check the traffic stats after a few months, and perhaps slap on Adsense so you can get a clearer idea of the potential income from such a venture. Adsense generally does very badly for directories, but this doesn't apply to all niches.