St0n3y has a good post at SEW about an idea for creating a more relevant and powerful link page based on an article with multiple tips:

1) We write an article about an industry related topic. For this example, let's say it's a site that sells baby products. We might write an article called "important baby care tips." The article has a couple of opening paragraphs and a closing paragraph. The Bulk of the article will be written by sites we wish to exchange links with, under a section headed as "Here are some tips and ideas to assist you in your baby-care needs:". To start things off, we also write the first tip. We then invite related sites to write a 50 (plus or minus) word tip that also links to their site however they want. After we get about 10 tips, we then start the process over again with a new article, or even have several articles covering multiple topics at the same time.

2) In exchange we write a completely original article and ask them to place it on their site. Of course, we give them the option of having a full article of their own (with no other outgoing links) on our site should they choose to write one up.

As for the merits of this, it rids websites of those nasty "link" pages, while giving each site valuable content. The likelihood of these links driving traffic

It's a very smart idea, and could be further refined and adopted to make for much better reciprocal type exchanges. I'm a fan and so are some other folks in the thread. Justilien and Chris Boggs (who deserves more shout-outs for his skills) both chime in with advice and praise.

Honestly, I'd be thrilled to see something like this adopted industry-wide. It's so tiring to see the same old recip. link directories all the time.