What Blog/Feed Directories Need

I have spent some time recently posting this site on various blog directories. As I perused each, and searched for feeds that I might be interested in reading, I ran across a common problem: old, defunct, non-updated blogs/feeds.

This is extremely frustrating for users. Time is spent clicking on various links to look at a site and finding that it hasn’t had a post in months (even years) or that it no longer exists.

My recommendation:

1) It seems that these sites could run some form of link checker for all the sites in their directory. At the very least, they could rid themselves of sites that no longer existed.

2) Somehow, someway they could provide stats on each feed. The most important stats to me would be:
Date of Last Post and How Many Posts in Last 90 Days. The first would tell me if the site was currently being maintained. The second tells me how often posting occurs on the site. I don’t mind blogs that only post occasionally, but as long as I see that they are current and there is some form of regular posting, then my interest is retained. Once my interest is retained THEN I could go to their site and see if it is content I really desire. This would make directories immensely more useful.

3) Require feed submitters to add some form of coherent description about their site. Several do this already, which is good. However, some descriptions of the sites are the first two or three sentences of a sites HTML code, which is confusing at best.