How about a voting next to the link?

Just a suggesiton, having a open voting result from editors or form people, then the results show next to the link, like "editor choice" or "people choice". Some directory is getting really big, hard to make a sharf. Using stars or something ... 1 star, 2 star, .... etc.

Yeah, some link has star, for example http://dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/On_the_Web/Web_Portals/ what that star based on?

Having ranking help ...

My cynicism says that the persistent black hat SEO's would soon find a way to vote for their customer sites through robot proxy voting.

Stars - see http://www.dmoz.org/guidelines/describing.html#cool

http://inelegant.org/ddp/07001/

and to see a lot of star [cool sites] in one place http://www.cool-sites-project.com/Computers/Internet/On_the_Web/Web_Portals/

and that's an editor decision, not for the public to vote.

You can see our data used in different ways by other directories. If you want rankings, Google's version will order by PR. Someone, somewhere will probably have a public voting version. "Cool" sites are usually used to denote the most comprehensive or definitive site on a topic, often an "official" site.