Today Gather [gather.com] launched. Gather is a next generation user generated content community and exploit with a nice set of social networking and collaborative filtering features.

Registered users can publish articles and Gather provides various layers of visibility for those:

Editors’ Picks
Browse By Topic
Top Rated Articles (content quality)
Most Read Authors (reputation)
gee, there are Tags
Popular Topics
Recent Articles and Comments

I didn’t try it yet, and there are tons of (social) features inside, so you might want to check out the Gather Lingo and the comprehensive review by Robin Good.