The big news today was Rojo's launch of a personalized memedigger - basically your own version of Digg within Rojo's RSS reader. Predictably, it considers your ratings, the ratings of others, the number of times a post has been read and a few other variables to ascertain what's important to you. It then creates a community front page where...ah, I'm sure you can guess.
Alex Barnett and the attention gang will be hoping you can export your ratings when you move to another feedreader, but I really doubt this is the case. At some point someone will blow this wide open and allow you to export your ratings along with your OPML, but until then your data is locked into Rojo, Digg, or whatever memedigger you happen to use. You'll also notice a very important point here: personal RSS readers and memediggers have just been fused together. There's really no difference between reading a story on the Rojo front page and reading it in your personalized section - it's all part of one system. The same goes for importing your OPML file into Tailrank or Megite - in that instance, your RSS reader and the memetracker become the same entity. This holistic approach (personal+community) is the inevitable outcome of all social software, so we really shouldn't be surprised. The surprising part is that so many people have used Digg up to this point, with very little personal gain. (Yes, the motivation is different.)