Directories can be a great way to get vital links to your Blog but the problem is actually getting your site listed.
Take for example Blogwise.com today they have 71067 blogs listed and a queue of 48335 blogs waiting to be approved. There current rate of approval is a mere 25 sites in the last 7 days. Clearly they cannot cope with the boom in Blogging.
The reason for this slow approval rate is that every site is manually reviewed by volunteer editors. This outdated approach is bad for the blogosphere and creates frustration with webmasters, just like with the old dinosaur DMOZ (open directory). In these days of high speed internet, the mechanics of these incredibly slow search aids should be re-thought.
My suggestion is that all submissions should be instantly added to the database with the assumption that most will be honestly submitted to the correct category and contain inoffensive content. Automatic spam filters could be used to hold suspicious sites in a queue for manual checking. This way the approval queue would be much reduced in size.
Sites in the index could then be subject to user voting to adjust their ranking in the directory rather than it being an alphabetical list that attracts spam names such as 1aardvark.com
Also, there could be a “report this site button” where people can send feedback to the editorial team.
Submitting to directories should be made quick, free and easy. Please comment…
Today I went over to take some photos of the fish that hang out near a small dam. But the water was more polluted than usual with scum on the surface. The fish seemed to be making a meal of it though. Maybe it was waste water from restaurants? The fish are many years old so they probably contain lots of unpleasant chemicals, so you wouldn’t want to eat these fish.
We went to the beach which is around 27 minutes drive away to see if there were any kinds of water sports going on. I have a windsurf board so wanted to find a good place to use it.
In Japan, we can drive onto the beach and park close to the water. Our car is 4WD which makes this possible too. Much better than in England where I used to have to park well away from the beach and pay for parking and risk getting my car broken into.
At the beach we found surfers, windsurfers and kite boarding. So plenty of action. There were waves, wind and it was warm. So it seems like I found the ideal place to come and windsurf 
Today I smelled food being fried in the kitchen and since I was feeling hungry, I thought I would see if there were any nibbles available.
Well I was surprised to find a friend had gone out to the river bank to pick some Acacia flowers to turn into Tempura. It tasted ok with some salt sprinked on it with a subtle, knd of sweet flavour from the flowers.
From this:
To this:
Today we drove up to some view point areas in the surronding hills. Unfortunately the sky was a bit misty so the camera couldn’t pick out the sea and distant mountains in any great detail but here are a few snaps:
This snap shows the view across the city towards the sea of Japan. There is a shipping port in the far distance but it can’t be seen here.
Here is a view of the distant mountains from the other side of the hill:
A nice view of the forest vegetation (there should be a colorful display of flowers below but we were there at the wrong time for this):
Around this area we spotted some ants building a nest. Once I homed in with the camera they were a bit nervous and stayed in the hole, but one brave one came out with a bit of gravel to add to the pile outside:
Afterwards we had lunch at a popular buck wheat noodle restaurant, the meal only cost 500 yen each (~MacDonalds price but with 99% less fat . These Noodles are hand made by the owners. You dip them into the soy sauce to eat after you mixed some of the green wasabe into the soy sauce to give it some spice. The other items are pickles, soy bean curd, leaf veg and onion.
