More to the point, it's a shame that we can't collectively grok (dammit, they took that from us too) concepts like "personal" and/or "curated" directories, e.g. individual and group wikis and so forth on perhaps more directed topics with lists of good links.

Other than the obvious (but surmountable) technical challenges with crawling and indexing, trying to establish "goodness" for a given user is tough. For a blogger it will be "hey, you are reading this so you probably like what I like". That's often true but as soon as you try to have a centralized service with arbitrary users, it is hard to do anything better than filtering purely commercial content.

what you mean we can't? there are a lot of curated content directories out there.