Social news site Digg rises from ashes

Digg, the once high-flying social news site, relaunched Wednesday under new ownership after a six-week rebuilding. The newly launched site for Digg is "turning it back into a startup," the Digg team said in a blog post. "With this launch, we're taking the first step towards (re)making Digg the best place to find, read and share the most interesting and talked about stories on the Internet -- and we want your help." Online media firm Betaworks said last month that it had acquired the core assets of San Francisco-based Digg and planned to merge them with its News.me service for sharing articles on iPads, iPhones and by email newsletters. Digg, launched in 2004, became a global sensation as an online venue for submitting news stories that climbed or sank in rankings based on votes, referred to at the website as "diggs." The new Digg will require users to login with Facebook as "a short-term solution that will seriously cut down on spam, while we take our time to develop more robust spam-filter technology." It will use Facebook shares, tweets, and other data to determine where a story should sit on the home page "but we care first and foremost about what Digg users have to say -- measured, as always, in diggs." More than 28 million stories were submitted to Digg since it launched. But it fell out of favor as people shifted to rival services and social networks Facebook and Twitter to share news with friends. Industry figures indicate about seven million people visited Digg each month before it was sold. News.me was launched early last year as a way for people to easily share when friends at Twitter or Facebook are reading.