It seems that Digg has inspired a whole new genre of people-powered sites, but as Kevin Kelly points out, we don't have a name for them yet. For now, I'll call them memediggers.
So here's the thing: I've noticed a few people using the word memetracker to describe Digg, Reddit and similar sites. But as far as I'm concerned, these aren't really memetrackers. To clarify: a memetracker is a service that finds the most talked-about news and ideas by analysing the linking behaviour of blogs. It's based on implicit actions. A memedigger, meanwhile, uses explicit human-powered voting systems to deliver the most popular, relevant or interesting items. Since they require human action, these sites normally have a verb associated with them: Digg It, Shout It and so on. Social bookmarking sites are also memediggers to some extent, where bookmarking a site counts as a vote (del.icio.us/popular, for example). But enough with the buzzwords - let's try to get a handle on what's happening in this space...
The Memediggers
Most Digg-like sites focus on finding the latest news, but the model is increasingly being applied to other media types. Some notable examples:
The "Digg Clones"
There are literally hundreds of near-identical memediggers springing up - most of them built on the open source Pligg software. Many have been criticized for failing to take the Digg idea forward, while others have applied the concept to interesting new topics. There are far too many to list here, but I'll include a few that crossed my radar recently:
Final Thoughts