Perhaps it's not as exciting, shiny or new as digg or reddit, but the recent stories on the history of Slashdot have been fairly interesting. It's worth noting that they were about as far from an SV startup as you can get.
Part 1: http://meta.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/02/1553218
Part 2: http://meta.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/10/1445216
Part 3: http://meta.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/17/1412245
Their setup, part 1, hardware: http://meta.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/18/1641203