I am afraid this is new scourge of internet and it is going to affect you sooner or later. But all is not lost, there are a few things you can do to protect yourself. First off I would suggest not publishing full content feeds, that is only publish part of a large article and link it back to your website. Secondly put a copyright notice in your feed. Then if someone copies it verbatim they will get copyright notice as well, when they republish it all of there readers will know what they've been up to. Thirdly contact there publisher of your work and remind them that they are stealing copyrighted material.

If you do want to republished content from other feeds then you should contact publisher and ask permission. When you republish content do not remove any links and make sure original publisher is properly attributed. This way you get free content and author get some traffic, a fair exchange and everyone wins.

Most of directories do not do direct links and instead use redirects, this is usually because link tracking is in place. Unusually LSblogs links directly to sites it lists which I believe will count towards your back links unlike redirects.

Besides LSblogs that I have just mentioned other directory that generated some traffic was Blogarama.

Unfortunately you do not know which directories are going to generate traffic until you have been listed. You can increase your chances of ensuring traffic by submitting to directories that already have a lot of traffic. I would suggest that as it takes little time and effort to submit your site to blog directories and as they are few and far between compared to generic directories it is a worthwhile exercise.

The experiment is far from over as I still have many blog directories to submit to and I will be looking at long term traffic from these sites. There will be an update to come which will include a list of all of blog directories.