the algorithms in this book might get you thinking in generally the right direction, but you might miss out on a couple of critical ingredients -- namely, time-based decay functions that make things float and sink (and float again -- dont forget that!), weighting things based on a user's "input worth" (how much you value someone's vote), and so on.

i see these three components as being the basic broth for a good "organic ranking" site:

  1. time since the article was submitted, probably represented logarithmically.

  2. how many votes came in, measured by how quickly they came in from the articles submission and how far apart each vote is.

  3. the "weight" of the users voting on the article.