I personally like magazine style layouts, but the layouts need to be context sensitive like you would see in a magazine or newspaper. Stories that are more prominent in the design should be more popular. Stories should also be grouped sensibly.

Zite does this extremely well. Pulp, on the other hand, does it pretty poorly. Doing this on Digg's homepage is going to be challenging to not look schizophrenic. But on Digg's sub-topics, this type of layout will work well. I find scanning through tabular data to be fatiguing and I often scan over items out of boredom.