Hi Cam, thank you for both joining the list and warm review of my site!
You are right - this lists serve little purpose if they used just as lists with links, but as a community they are pritty good tool for sharing the visitors and rates the sites popularity based on statistics - like banner adds 100 "just visitors" to your site will produce X ammount of clicks to the list - more popular the website, more people will visit the list! In the corporate world (that I am not a member of, but know a few sicrets) these visitors called "stray visitors" - the lists purpose is to cupture them within the community
and match with the member that will provide the needed information or artwork or simply entertainment. Satisfied this way people will come back to your site or other members sites again and again. So by participating in the such community we do each other a favor by sharing visitors that would live our own site anyway! Ok now is the tough part this scenario will only work if everyone has the link to the list in traffic areas of their sites and the sites are the quality sites. So if the list is used as the end result with hopes that it will work itself non of the quility sites, like yours, should put the lists logo in the major traffic areas. I will not!
To avoid such a pitfall I am using list merely as a convinient and familiar to most of us software. What I am creating is a valuable community, selecting quility sites like yours, to be placed permanently on the list's(communitiy's) homepage after carefull review and approval. After I select "first ten" finalists from new members, in a day or two I will remove the offer (read below) and will start feature merits of other members sites and guest artists from my collection and new comers to the list. First guest artist will be Year 2000 Carnegie Art Award ($50K) winner Petri Hytonen from
Finland that I am friends for 12 years and have exhibited with. So keep checking the site. Did I mention that all this is free now and in the future?
We are up to an exciting future and I am glad that you are on board. One may ask "why he is doing all that? where is the catch?"
There isn't one - I am doing it to show and rase awareness that the art of fresco is undergoing a modern revival and to built a base for the international fresco society through making information on fresco easily accessable to people. I am on my tenth year of this quest and fith online. The results are somehow satisfactory, together with Amy Bowers (Emmy Award winning, documentarist) we in post-production of a
full lenght "Albuquerque Fresco - Inside Look" fresco technique -
educational documentary feature. A free introductory video is
availabe at www.truefresco.com And online if you search for fresco in any, and I mean any search engine truefresco.com or main page of its section's (over 350 pages and growing) will come up in the first ten.

sorry for the mini rant and braggin - LA gets to me, i guess.

Once again Thank You for joining.

Ilia Anossov
fresco painter, sculptor
www.truefresco.com