I posted this to a thread, but I think it got lost there so I decided to start a new thread for this instead. Can someone or someones (not sure that's a word ) explain this a bit for me? What are blog directories? Are they the same thing as website directories? Why are the useful? Do they actually help bring traffic, increase rankings through backlinks, or both? Is there a list of these somewhere?

I know lots of questions. I really appreciate the willingness of the people here to answer my questions, even the most basic of them. Hopefully I'm helping someone else too, by asking things they also wanted to know but didn't ask for whatever reason.