digg gets sponsor for Digg Arc beta

Last week, Digg Labs rolled out the latest in its suite of tools that help Digg readers “visualize” the movement of news stories through the Digg ecosystem — a Flash visualization called Digg Arc — with Intel as the exclusive launch sponsor. (Chas from FM Publishing brokered the sponsorship deal.)

Cool way to match up advertising sponsor with a beta project from an innovation labs group within a company.

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.”