Center Networks is reviewing yet another DiggEsque application called, in what has got to be one of the most questionable rebranding efforts of the year:  Propeller  .  Propeller started life as the Netscape ranking site that was very similar to Digg and designed to compete with it.    That effort having failed, it appears Propeller is an attempt to rebrand things such that they can take another shot at Digg.

I’m having a lot of trouble understanding “the point” in what seem like similar approaches to the same challenge, which is getting people to *participate* very actively in story selection and commentary.     Rather than “we’ll build a site and they’ll come to it” approach I want to see dramatic improvements to portable identities.   MyBlogLog is the closest thing to what I think is the clear  “right answer” here.  Basically, what I want is for every online person to have an identity.  I want to see that identity when they visit my websites and I want to see that identity when I am visiting a site they’ve also visited recently (or maybe … visited ever).   One interesting extension that might come out of this would be a superior “vote by your feet” ranking system where pages at which many people spent a lot of time would have more authority, and when this was combined with tags and comments by the visitors you’d have a fairly robust system for ranking sites.