From Chas's post on an innovative Digg/Intel deal:

Earlier today Digg rolled out the latest in its suite of tools that help Digg readers “visualize” the movement of news stories through the Digg ecosystem — a widget called Digg Arc — with Intel as the exclusive launch sponsor. (FM brokered the sponsorship deal.) Digg’s Daniel Burka announced the news on Digg’s blog earlier today and posted it to Digg.com. Within an hour it was, in the Digg parlance, “made popular” as members began Digging the story at a rapid rate. As I write this, 10 hours after the story started its climb up the Digg ranks, 1039 members have Dugg the story — more than one per minute.

From Daniel Burka’s post at Digg the Blog:

“Exciting new update to Digg Labs today. Thanks to the hard work of stamen design and support from Intel, we’re launching a new animation, Digg Arc. While the other animations in Labs are at the story level, Arc is the first app that provides a view of Digging activity at the topic and subtopic-level. Presented as a circle, Arc shows the most recently Dugg stories on the outside of the circle, with width indicating the relative popularity of that story against its peers. The middle ring is the sub-topic for the stories and the inner ring represents the topic. As new stories are Dugg, the story, sub-topic, and topic are highlighted with a quick flash….

“We’re excited to have Intel as our first partner in Labs and want to thank them and stamen design for helping us develop Arc.”

In addition to supporting Digg with traditional ad units, Intel decided to “join the conversation,” or support it more organically anyway, by helping to fund Digg product development to benefit the Digg community. The Digg team, as you might expect, thanked Intel for the support. Simple good manners, right? Now, not yet a half a day into the sponsorship, Intel is riding the wave of a popular news item amid the editorial fabric of Digg. Nice move, Intel!