Promote / Digg anything

In the post about Team Blogs I mentioned a page that would show the latest updates to all the team blogs and some kind of "Digg It" system that would let community members promote a cool blog post to the Community News Feed on the main page. This promotion mechanism was a consistent theme in the brainstorming sessions, and the general consensus was that it would be really cool if, once a user was logged in, she or he was able to Digg just about anything - any thread in the forum, any blog post, any part in the registry, and any wiki page.

It would probably be useful to see a list of all recently Dugg items, and certainly it would be useful to see a "Most diggs of all-time" list. Furthermore, I think it would provide a real incentive to write interesting posts in the team blogs, particularly if getting a post dugg (just once? how many times?) would promote it to the igem2007 main page and into the Community News RSS feed.

But despite the simplicity of the Digg operation, it seems like this could be a pretty complicated thing to implement across the entire site. And how do we deal with team members digging eachother's content?

Another way of thinking about the digg feature might be to contextualize it as a "Favorite this" operation. Users should click the favorite button next to any content that they want to show up in a dynamic list. I could see myself clicking this for help documents or discussion topics I like to visit often... but I don't think it would work for promoting blog posts. Hmm.