Welcome to the Q&A Forum

If you're asking whether canonical tags pass PageRank, the answer is yes. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html

You know what I do when I want to get sense of whether or not a directory page might be worth it?  I go to the directory page that I would expect to get a link from, click on a link, then run a OSE report on the page I land on to see how it shows in the report.  Do that for a few more links on that and other pages and you'll get an idea of it's value.  Keep in mind that directories are often not a good choice when it comes to long-term link value.

ScreamingFrog will also let you see External HTML links from a site. Plus it works on Mac.

By failed press release I mean this...  Sometimes you put in all the effort, write for people, not SEO, do your best to make it interesting, relevant, and newsworthy, and it just doesn't get picked up.  If the release isn't picked up, there's not really any link building and the SEO benefits are severely limited. Thus the idea to re-roll such content into guest blogging material.  Naturally you wouldn't try to copy/paste into a blog.  In my experience there's a decent amount of time that went into the content creation for that press release, which hasn't left much of a footprint in Google ("failed PR").  Since you did the work on the content creation, why not try to keep leveraging it in other mediums until you get some return on the time you spent creating the content. I like your idea about reversing the guest blogging order, but how do you do that if you don't have a blog?