Can We "Digg" Forums?

When at a loss for what you might want to blog about, go to Digg.com...and voila--the top entry on the page was about a new site that's using Web 2.0 online community concepts to bubble up the best technical pieces of content to other devs.

https://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2007/03/tweako_a_social.html

The site is called "Tweako", and the idea is to use a Digg-like interface to elevate the most interesting pieces of content to the top.  A simple idea, but as Digg has shown, the concept works fairly well.

This got me to thinking...how could this be applied to community discussion sites, like the MSDN Forums?  I've toyed with the idea of "Digging" individual users to create reputation, but never ordering the content based on votes.  What would this look like?  Would it work?

I've always thought that there really are two different types of users that are going to the forums--people who want to participate in the discussion and people who just want to search and read the discussions.  Looking at our server logs, 99% of the people who go to the forums never even register, much less post content.

Given this, two different views make sense--the standard, chronological interface for users that want to participate in forums the way they always have, and a new, Digg-style interface for the browsers.

The Digg-style interface would bubble up the *best* posts by forum.  The voting could also go into search relevancy, making sure that the best threads show up first.  It'd also be a great feed to expose on the MSDN Developer Centers for given technologies.

Just my thoughts for a Friday...