Dave Winer has laid out a proposal on his blog for an ‘elite Digg’ of sorts. It seems he’s been fed up with Digg ever since it grew from hundreds of users into hundreds of thousands and millions of users – and now he wants to hark back to the old days where only somewhere between 100-1,000 were using it and submitting stories. His initial plan is to have 25 or so invite-only members who would be allowed to submit stories to the site, and then all of the Internet could read what these 25 found.

While I understand what Dave Winer is looking for here – a more taut collection of stories then say “Cute, Fluffy South China Tiger Cub Born in South Africa“, as is a top story on Digg as I write this – he wants to create dozens if not more of these “Diggs” which would likely dilute the quality of stories too much.

If he does want each elite blogger to have his or her own Digg, it would seem at least one already has something similar in place – it just doesn’t look like Digg. He mentions Robert Scoble – well as Robert Scoble loves to point out, you should be reading his Google Reader Shared Feed. That is essentially his “Digg”. True, you can’t vote on the stories he picks, but if Google Reader would simply implement the idea I’ve laid out numerous times, and showcase which stories are ’starred’ and ’shared’ the most, that would essentially be Digg.

This idea also brings to mind what Jason Calacanis did with Netscape last year when he hired some of the top Digg (and other social bookmarking sites) users to serve as editors of sorts – making sure the main page of Netscape was populated with quality stories.

Then of course there is Techmeme, which sort of does what Mr. Winer appears to be looking for (for tech news at least), by displaying stories some of the higher-end bloggers think well enough of to write about, but lacks the voting and refreshes slower on a daily basis then Digg of old.

There is also the can or worms that Digg itself worked hard to shut at the beginning of this year by removing the Top Users list (of which I was one). There was a growing perception around Digg – true or not – that a handful of users completely controlled the stories that became popular. I saw first hand the so-called regular users get really upset by this perception, and so I’m not sure how a user would react to being fed information from only a handful of sources – though maybe if they were told that upfront, it would be a non-issue, who knows.

Dave Winer claims Steve Gillmor is actually working on something like this right now (in private beta) and that he should be ready to announce it soon (maybe even this week). I’m a little confused as to what exactly that will be – an ‘elite Digg’ Digg-killer, a Digg-maker like Blogger is a blog maker, or something entirely different. But he sure sounds excited about it.

Again, while I understand where Dave Winer is coming from with this idea, I’m not sure it could actually work any better then some of the things we already have out there. If Google would just get off its ass and make Google Reader data transparent (for those who wanted to show it of course), we might already have a solution.

I think the real idea here should not be to keep on creating more Digg-clones, but to create something entirely new that will revolutionize the landscape.