There's a project underway to reproduce the functionality of the Digg social news site, so that folks can install their own local versions of the Digg engine. This is hot! I started thinking a whole ago about this concept of local repositories for what are currently global systems such as del.icio.us. I know of quite a few organizations that currently use del.icio.us to keep a collaborative collection of links by designating a particular unique tag that all members of the group mark their contributions with, and the generated RSS feed is then syndicated on the group's blog/website/wiki. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to set up a local installation of the del.icio.us engine for those groups to be able to use? Of course, then the global del.icio.us pool wouldn't be benefitting from the links those users are submitting — but perhaps there could be a way for the local installations to ping the global del.icio.us in addition to keeping their own localized dataset separately.

I still want the local del.icio.us clone, but a local Digg clone is a good start. For use in small research or project groups, it seems like an awesome way to generate a highly salient collection of links without the degradation of the signal to noise ratio that tends to happen as sites like del.icio.us and Digg scale up.