Social Content
Social Content sites are sites where the content, usually produced by third parties, is filtered and rated by a community.
Digg is the most well-known example.
Examples
From an overview at http://franticindustries.com/blog/2006/12/12/the-future-of-digg-like-websites/
"1. English Digg-like social news sites. This means sites which cover a broad range of categories, and are in concept similar to Digg, with standard browse-submit-vote-comment functionality. This includes Pligg sites, which aren’t that much different from Digg, but tend to be similar between each other.
Newsvine.com - Blinkbits.com - Hubpages.com - Thebeststuffintheworld.com - Wikio.com
2. English specific social news sites. These are sites with functionality similar to Digg, but instead of covering all possible topics, they focus on one category.
Flurl.com - QJ.net - Dzone.com - Bestweekever.tv/ble/ - Bad.webpagesthatsuck.com
3. Non-English social news sites. From Meneame to Fresqui.com, these are the sites that cater to the social news needs in a language other than English.
Meneame.net - Fresqui.com - Fuzz.fr - Overmundo.com.br - Mywowo.com - Wykop.pl
Assessment
From an overview at http://franticindustries.com/blog/2006/12/12/the-future-of-digg-like-websites/
"The prospect for upcoming social news websites is grim. It seems that it takes a combination of an interesting specific topic, great design and functionality, and an original approach to achieve at least moderate popularity. And even then there’s a chance your website will just stall at the same traffic volume for months, and maybe years, before it finally shuts down. There’s still some room for growth if your website is non-english and/or covering a specific geographic area. Of course, I cannot rule out that some ingenious site will show up and take the world by storm, but from what I’ve seen in this research, none of the newcomers show signs of greatness.
The way I see it, the concept of social content websites does not work on its own - except in rare cases of Digg and Reddit. It’s a great addition to a website that already has good content, or plans to build good content in the future, but it’s definitely not driving growth by itself. For now, the Digg effect seems to be reserved for Digg only; the future lies somewhere else." (http://franticindustries.com/blog/2006/12/12/the-future-of-digg-like-websites/)