Ning (and now flux) commoditized social networking and allow anyone who can click a mouse to have their own network. The same thing is now happening with social bookmarking sites that allow people to vote bookmarks up to a top list (better known as Digg).

There are scores of Digg clones already, of course. The most well known is Reddit, which was acquired by Condé Nast a little over a year ago. But there are also emerging platforms that allow anyone to create their own Digg-like site.

We’ve covered these as they launch. Our favorite is coRank, which recently relaunched and has a lot of loyal users.

Pligg is another – it’s a well known open source project that allows people to create Digg-like sites. Pligg was recently put up for sale, but as far as I can tell it was never sold.

Today Pligg announced (buried in a blog post) that the upcoming launch of Fraxi

Soon we will be launching a new service called “Fraxi” which will allow anyone to create their own free Pligg powered niche community with just a few clicks of a mouse button. For example if someone living in Miami wanted to create a social network for the citizens of their community, they will be able to create Miami.Fraxi.com in a matter of seconds. No hosting fees, no installation process and no time wasted. They can then concentrate on growing their social network instead of needing to learn the ropes of FTPing, monkeying with server configurations, setting up domains, etc. More information about this service and website will be unveiled soon.

Not much in the way of details, but the Fraxi site is up with a landing page. See this blog for more editorial.

Digg itself will likely enter this market in 2008, we hear. This could possibly be through an acquisition, although a source tells us this would be for customers, not technology.

A hot rumor early this week/ late last week had Digg in acquisition talks to acquire hosted social voting site provider coRank (coRank allows users to quickly create Digg-like sites in much the same way Ning allows people to create social networks).

No one asked coRank to see if the rumor was true, so I did. CEO Rogelio Bernal Andreo denies being in acquisition talks with Digg:

coRank is still a baby and we still have a lot of work to do. We’re exploring collaborations and partnerships, but not a full sale. So my official answer is that no, we have not previously talked to Digg

Rogelio told me that coRank approached Digg in May about a possible collaboration but were rebuffed. He suggests that Digg cloning would be a logical business for Digg. Digg was not adverse to the idea, he said, but they were not willing to partner.

As Digg looks for new avenues of growth, they may be inclined to help others build Digg-like sites by providing a white-label service. Today that business is grabbed by coRank, the open source Pligg, and others.

coRank has moved on from its original roots as a Digg-style site provider and now offers a range of varying sites, many of which don’t include Digg features. See our October write-up for their latest incarnation.

Hosted social voting site provider coRank has relaunched with a list of new capabilities.

The new options can be enabled/disabled by owners of coRank sites as they see fit (except for the personal dashboard). New features include

• Local copy: Being able to store local ‘cached’ copies of anything that is submitted. coRank note that this may be controversial, but claim that legally it has been cleared. It certainly sounds evil.
• Collaborative editing: Users can now edit submitted stories, and also have access to wiki-style features such as view “change history.”
• Individual privileges: Users can now decide who can/cannot submit stories and edit submissions
• Full Template Edit: Site admins can now edit all of the coRank site templates, allowing for 100% customization. coRank claim that from a development standpoint, this feature + the API offers a platform only matched by the freedom of using Open Source.
• My Dashboard: A central location from where a coRank user can get a glance of whatever is that he/she is doing at any coRank site

Users can already eliminate the Digg-style voting feature, which coRank claims opens up the possibility of using the service for a plethora of different uses, such as collective social bookmarking and dynamic repositories such as Wikimarks.

coRank currently has 1600 registered site owners, of which around half are regular users.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery Digg would be at the top of the heap. The site that popularized social news has been copied, cloned and even spawned Pligg, an open source Digg style script.

If Pligg opened up Digg style clones to site hosts and developers, coRank takes the concept to the mass market; users who either can’t or don’t want to host Pligg on their own domain. coRank is to Digg clones what Blogger once was for blogging.

coRank has evolved from its earlier incarnation as a stand alone Digg clone. The new coRank is now a fully customizable hosted social voting platform. Users can set up social news sites through easy to use menu options without the need to edit code. Like Blogger there is a range of templates available, including one that looks just like Digg. The options are surprisingly broad. Users can customize everything from the name of voting members through to the names given to the actual voting system. Everything from user banning through to privacy options and user statistics has been included.

Although the entire morality of an army of Digg clones may be a passionate topic for debate, there’s little doubt that social news continues to grow. Ethics aside coRank is a notable point in the progression of social news development. In time coRank is an idea that is sure to be cloned itself.

Digg revolutionized social news when it launched in 2004. Since then, it has become the undisputed champ of news link ranking sites. They just recently crossed the million mark. And their influence goes far beyond those user registration numbers.

Tangible evidence of Digg’s importance: the raw number of clones and Digg gaming schemes out there. We’ve seen rigging, vote buying, profile sales, and accusations of thug rule. The dozens of clones include a not-bad SourceForge project called Pligg, which lets users “build their own Digg”.

But Digg’s ubiquity and influence doesn’t mean it’s perfect. A number of startups are tackling the same problem as Digg – sharing of good content via link submission and some form of voting. One of them, stumbleupon, actually has more registered users than Digg. For the most part, though, these sites won’t be able to do much damage to Digg’s steady growth. But many of them are worth looking at, and they all have individual features that could, if incorporated into Digg, make it a better overall service.

BlinkList
BlinkList takes a distributed approach to the Digg model. It lets anyone get their own link blog where they can add their favorites. BlinkList then looks across the whole network and ranks the site based on how many other users added the link.

ClipMarks
Instead of full URLs, Clipmarks lets users share just the best parts of webpages. Using their plugin, you can bundle together your favorite selections of content from a webpage. This includes text as well as pictures and video. Submissions are then “popped” by other members of the community, with the most popular at the top. Using the plugin, you can also submit your clips to your blog. Currently, the site’s two pane page layout gives me the feeling of looking at the net through a steamship porthole.

CoRank
CoRank confronts the mob mentality on Digg. Digg promotes stories to the front page based on the votes of the whole community, resulting in a lot of noise for users with interests different from the crowd. CoRank lets you look at all submitted links or filter out the noise by subscribing links from just the users you choose. Only the highest rated stories from your subscribed sources make your front page.

Netscape
Netscape has also taken on Digg’s mob mentality, mixing in their own team of anchors to submit stories and cut out spam. The anchor’s stories are featured on the front page along with the current top 25 stories. They also got into a little hot water with their recruitment practices. Netscape has managed a greater variety of content in it’s front page, pulling 2 stories from each of the top 10 most popular channels and 1 story from each of the next 5 most popular channels.

Newsvine
Instead of a submission free-for-all, Newsvine implemented it’s own form of quality control by only allowing users to vote on content from the Associated Press and other user’s personal articles. Users are given a live feed of all the latest AP stories, voting on articles and writing their own on their personal column page. Newsvine shares 90% of all revenue generated by advertisements on your column page with the user. Users can also personalize their feed

OpenServing
OpenServing is a product of Wikia, and the opensource version of BlinkList works for fun or profit. The concept is the same, a personal page of links, democratically ranked by your friends, but it also lets you post your own ads on the site.

Reddit
Reddit made headlines when Conde Nast acquired them. The site is a favorite of mine and is still up and running, with some key differences from Digg. Reddit rankings are based on an absolute vote (+1 for hot, -1 for cold), meaning a story can dance up and down Reddit’s top page instead of being buried out of existence by a few power users. To see what’s on top now, there’s also a “hot” list. This type of voting system also means the front page can be stagnant, to the chagrin of some users, but it has also avoided Digg’s payola scandals. Another bigger differentiator for Reddit is their recommended article page, which suggests links based on your voting pattern.

Spotback
Spotback is an automated alternative to Digg, that aims to use personalization to improve the signal to noise ratio of the stories you see. You train Spotback by clicking and voting on the stories it digs up. Voting positively on a story causes Spotback to reveal the next most relevant story. One of the best parts about Spotback is that it doesn’t even require a registration to get up and running.

Spotplex
Spotplex is another automated link site that automatically submits stories from blogs carrying its badge. Stories are then ranked on the Spotplex homepage based in part on how many views the article generates (the algorithm is still being tweaked). The site’s automation and closely controlled blogroll seems has avoided the types of rigging Digg was subjected to, but it lacks the community of commentors that make these social media sites addictive.

StumbleUpon
StumbleUpon provides a different user experience while discovering and digging up links. You use a tooblar (FF & IE) to tag, submit, and vote for links. While the site does rank links the main experience is by taking a random walk around the internet. It keys in on Diggs greatest strength, an easily accessible constant stream of interesting links. StumbleUpon is definitely catching on, they recently surpassed 2 million users.

CoRank launches out of private beta this evening. It’s best described as a cross between Digg and Bluedot. It has a Digg-like user interface where users view stories, but by default you are only shown stories bookmarked by other users you’ve added as friends.

To see the whole feature list, watch the tour, here. I like keeping track of stories bookmarked by my friends (which is why I prefer Bluedot over Del.icio.us), and this may appeal to some users. For others, they’ll be just fine sticking with the services they’re already using. It’s going to be very tough for services like CoRank to get the foothold they need to grow.

Before you count CoRank out, though, it’s worth noting that the founder, Rogelio Bernal Andreo, is both a former manager/engineer at eBay and Netscape and, more importantly, is the founder of eListas and eGrupos, one of the largest social networking site for Spanish speakers. Andreo says that he plans on introducing CoRank to the eListas audience, which is 20 million strong.