Is Digg The New DMOZ? Social Media Sites And Google Votes

Traffic and rankings have improved markedly on this site and I was wondering why. There's been no massive increase in links from other sites and I've not been messing around with the on-page SEO so why the increase?

I'm not saying this is the reason, but wouldn't it be great if Google used other types of votes to play a part in it's Google Algo - other than traditional links and a "thumbs up" on the toolbar?

There used to be stories that a link from the Yahoo! directory weighed more than the TBPR would indicate - purely because it was Yahoo! And the same was said about DMOZ.

But, when I was looking at my Google Webmasters link stats, I saw loads of links from people submitting this site to Digg.com. Would Google view these submissions as relevant "votes" and view them as being more authoritative than links on a random site with the same PR?

I'm not coming up with some wacky suggestion that they are. It's just theoretical - saying wouldn't it be a good idea to cherry pick social sites for vote casting? What are your thoughts?