Below is a link to a text file which contains an exported view for a "Recommended Diaries" feature I put together. It's not perfect but to the best of my knowledge (a contradiction in terms, perhaps) it's the only "recommended content" feature which uses "number of votes to rank content within an x-specficied amount of time" out there for Drupal right now.
Of course, the views.module and a working voting module which uses the voting API is a prerequesite.
The way it works is:
1. User's vote on content (you can choose which node type you want it to track) and then a block is displayed (no block is displayed if there is not content which has been voted on within an x-specified time period).
2. The block lists the the title of the node, the author of the node and the number of comments on the node in the order of most voted upon nodes to least voted on (nodes with no votes are not listed).
3. In cases of equal amounts of votes between two nodes the most recently posted node gets listed first.
4. You can specify how many nodes you want to appear in the block. A "more" link to a new page will appear on the block if there are more voted upon nodes than you choose to show in the block. The new page is a full listing of voted upon nodes within the x-specified amount of time.
What is hacktackular about it right now:
1. It calculates based on whether a node was voted on or not, instead of a vote total. Normally this is ok, except in the case where a single person votes, the node will be displayed as it should - but if that one person un-votes - the node will still show up in the recommended diaries block because it still shows as having been voted on (which according to the voting api seems is unrelated to whether it actually has a score or not).