During the latter half of the naughties (2000s), Digg was one of the premier destinations on the web. If your story ended up on the front page of Digg, then you were rewarded by hundreds of thousands of page views, quite a bounty considering publishers big and small made (and still make money) for page-view based advertising. The traffic bump came to be known as the Digg effect (much like being Slashdotted.) Digg, obviously fell on hard times and it was just over a year ago, it was acquired by New York-based technology and media company, Betaworks.

John Borthwick, chief executive of Betaworks, had a plan  — Digg still was a good brand and was an ideal vehicle for his vision of a social-data powered recommendation service and news reader. The early attempt at that social news reader, News.me, hadn’t really gone anywhere and they were ready to shut it…