This is one of the aspects I've been looking into using Content Recommendation for, but I'm looking at it from a larger information overload perspective.
Even a site like Digg can only really do popularity because of the binary nature of the thumbs up/thumbs down system, but once you move past the binary scale into a 5 star rating system and take your algorithms from a slope one into a latent semantic indexing, or something similar, instead of popularity you end up with personalization.
Of course this all depends on the quality of the data and the size of you user base, plus the cross section of the users that have voted on similar items, in this case blogs.
I'm personally taking the bet that this approach is one of the next great ways to organize information and is worth the next few years of my life to work on .