I stumbled across a great post about the importance of using both cold searching and warm, cuddly, user-generated content.

I totally agree. I love Yahoo! for keeping up its editorially-built directory. I think the Next Big Thing might be a Wiki Directory, with fewer bars to entry than Zeal or ODP - where anyone can submit a site and the problems of spam are solved, somehow.

My favorite quote from the post:

Recently I had a request where the person needed a list of vendors in a particular niche IT area. There was NOTHING available through the traditional sources I'd go to - OneSource, Hoover's, the market research firms or even MarketResearch.com. So what was left?

That's right - directory listings. I found two great directories through Yahoo! and through DMOZ (remember DMOZ? Wow, that seems old), which provided me 85% of the companies I needed to know about, and provided leads to the next 10%.

I've asked the hypothetical question before: could I have just conducted a search for this and found it? No way - my search NEVER would have turned up even 50% of the companies I found using these relatively authoritative directories.