Most people regard directories to be the most old fashioned way to organize information online ever, but the times they’re changin’, and a trend that’s only beginning to catch up and which looks back to directories is gaining momentum nowadays as a result of the re-inception of proper directories, or at least a clutter of themed links; take a look at search engines like Mahalo.com, who have people searching up stuff and organizing special reports and coverage of what’s going on in the internet to get what I’m saying.
WebPlaces.com is probably as close to innovative web design and programming as the humanity is to discovering the fountain of youth, granted, but such a collection of indexes, directories, meta-search engines, FTP, chat (IRC), usenet (newsgroups), and a wide selection of specialized directories can still be of much help in the territories where Google gets lost, and the truth remains that someone has to put good and useful stuff together for the average internet user to get to know them. This site is a quite limited if compared to others, but in turn has one big plus, namely reliability: the problem with directories, especially when they are massive, is keeping them updated, as it frequently is the case that you follow a link to a 404 error sign, a problem that does not happen in this site, as all of the links I clicked into worked. 
