[davewiner]

The difference between this approach and the ones that startups have been trying (I see a lot of them) is that this idea will work. They've been trying to create something that works for everyone. This approach only works for people who actively forward or retweet links.

[mckoss]

I think you'll find lots of attempts at ths problem. We tried to do this with data from Faves.com, our social bookmarking service. In the end we shut down our public recommendation service because we couldn't keep up with the spammers.

Any recommendation engine is a honeypot for web marketing types. I love the concept, but the scalable execution is very hard. I think the best sites approach this by engaging a motivated community, like HN, Reddit, and the original Digg. You need some zealous moderators to keep the spam at bay.

[martinkallstrom]

Dave, talk to Trunk.ly. If they fed their data into Directededge.com's API you would get exactly what you are looking for. A prototype would probably take them a mere few hours to implement, just to try out the idea.