After weeks of speculation that Digg or someone else was going to buy Spanish social news site Menéame and social news hosting service coRank – it’s been announced that the two will instead merge to form a new site called MeneaRank. This new venture could really shake things up. Update: In a great example of the pitfalls of cross-cultural reporting powered by little more than Twitter and Google Language Tools, it turns out that today is Feast of the Holy Innocents – apparently the Latin American and Spanish equivalent of April Fool’s Day. Doh! Hopefully there’s some truth to this joke, though! Thanks for the heads up in comments, kind readers.

Menéame is a very active Spanish language site that’s a lot like Digg, it could be the most successful of the “Digg clones” online. CoRank is comparable to Pligg but with a more commercial feel. It relaunched in its current form in May and Josh Catone gave it a good review. The combination of these companies’ efforts, data and communities is going to open a lot of interesting opportunities.

According to a post on the Menéame blog, the two sites will co-exist but will also collaborate on a wide variety of data sharing projects. One of the first will be competition for the Technorati Blog Index – a search engine that categorizes blogs by topic and then ranks them via votes and clickthroughs on Menéame and coRank. That project is said to be scheduled to launch at the end of next month.

This is a very logical coming together and one that should prove an interesting challenge to competing sites drawing only from the English-speaking world, one destination site or any single niche alone – like tech.

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