What Blogstart really needs to do in order to be a useful directory, is to ask a series of questions categorising the site over several trajectories. If the submission page was organised so that you were asked to specify an age range and a location and a type of log (personal, commentary, links, links and commentary etc) anda type of subject (mixed, film, news etc) plus things like gender, sexual preference etc etc. [With the proviso of course that you can leave any section blank], then the one-by-one category search could be replaced by more specific searches – ie. I really want to find a London-based, gay male weblogger who has some personal content on his site etc.etc.
This is probably the direction in which the site is developing anyway, but it bears comment, I think.