Does SEOmoz's thumb system hold any weight with search engine rankings?

On SEOmoz, if a blog post, a YOUmoz post, or a comment had a greater number of thumbs as another identical post/comment of equal real world or "human" value, would the search engines know? Would they care?

Wow, that's kind of a mouthful. Basically, does giving a blog post on SEOmoz a thumb up help that post become more "important" in the search engines algorithms?

1. As compared to other SEOmoz blog posts?
2. Compared to other SEOmoz content?
3. Compared to other blogs or websites?

Well, does it?

Does it? Well... I don't know. It should. After all, pages with more thumbs means more humans found that content to be useful. Google certainly can determine the topic of a paragraph if it is segmented properly in the code, and written with a topical structure. If an engine can segment and value the words of a paragraph, it can certainly segment a comment in a similar way. Consider the following two comments:

• Written by John Smith: Well Fred, I'd have to disagree with you. I think that if you teleported yourself inside yourself, you would explode. Here's why...

• Written by Intern00bcake: Hah that's super funny. lolz while I'm here I'm going to tell you about my services. For only 19.99 I can gain you a ranking on the first page of every search engine known to man. Check out my website at thiswebsitehaslotsofspammylinkspointingtoit.com.

What would Google see on this blog? Due to the heavy problem with blog spam throughout the Internet, I think by now Google has figured out that the second comment can be ignored entirely. It can at least ignore or devalue the text in some way, and if it doesn't, it certainly should. After all, the post is about teleportation and theoretical physics. Should the page be ranked for “cheaply priced SEO services”? Probably not. Especially not if it gets thumbed down.

Often, in many web 2.0 style voting systems, comments that do not meet a certain quality standard threshold get buried. That is.. the comment is not even shown to the users, and a search engine would have to crawl another link (which I don't think it does very often) to get to a buried comment. To the search engine, the text might be utterly invisible or just hold less weight.

On the contrary, a post with more thumbs up, I think, should hold a value similar to if a block of text is encased in <bold> or <strong> tags. It should be IMPORTANT. 

The discussion on the ways Google and other search engines can single out text on a page would take days, and maybe I'll touch on it in the next post.

But can Google count? 

Can it? Sure. Search for 1+1 and the answer will be one-boxed. But in the context of can Google count thumbs? I honestly don't know and I'd like to find out. What better place than right here on this page?

I'll follow up with a blog post later with my findings, but I'd like to play a counting game. I'm going to comment below and I'd like as many thumbs up as possible. Then, on another comment I'll write about something else. In this second comment, I'd like you to thumb me down. I know... thumb Fred down? No way. Yes.... please thumb that comment down (the second comment). If you feel bad about it, just thumb this post and I'll keep my rank ;)

It should look like this:

• posted by: justFred - topic 1 - 90 thumbs up, 0 thumbs down

• posted by: justFred - topic 2 -0 thumbs up, 90 thumbs down

And possibly a third comment (later on) with:

• posted by: justFred - topic 3 - 30 thumbs up, 0 thumbs down
  

It won't be perfect. I'll try to comment about 2 equally competitive search terms and have it flow naturally in the comments below.

If all goes well, we can test the search engines for the 2 topics in the comments, and see if one is more successful than the other. I need all you mozzers' help on this one. Not only do I need you to participate in the thumbing, but I also need you to point out any ranking factors that I did not think of, and help me with your geographic and profiled SERPs. This may end up far more complicated than it started- but all the better, right?

Start Thumbing. Yay or Nay?