The Hypergene Media Blog guys have an overview of social news reading site NewsVine, which is still in invitation-only beta. Their take is mostly from a high level, strategic perspective. Brian Benzinger of SolutionWatch, has been using NewsVine for a while, and drills down on the details.
I've never been a huge fan of explicit, vote based, recommendation systems, but there seems to be enough people willing to contribute enough free work to make sites like Slashdot, kuro5hin, Digg and now NewsVine, work. If nothing else, someone needs to call up the folks at ACM SIGCHI and have them set up a workshop on "media voting recommender systems" or somesuch. Maybe there's been some fundamental changes or discoveries since GroupLens that make a difference.