The next step in Digg clones: Imagine Digg in the old days, when there were just 25 people using it. Maybe that wasn’t enough. Maybe it didn’t really get interesting until there were 100 users or 250 or 1000. It was good, the articles were gems, things we weren’t finding on our own, there were huge numbers of them, but they were prioritized, and the community had a heart of gold, people were doing it for love. The maturity level was high.
[A friend and I were discussing a very similar idea, so I’d toss the following into the fire. Create an API for the blog readers that “marks” a story as highly rated by your community. The point it to avoid having a feed of highly rated stuff, but maintain whatever org system you want and just see that this story is recommended.]