DotSpots at South by Southwest (SXSW) and the Computer Assisted Reporting Conference (CAR2010)

March 9, 2010, by Kai Gradert Culture Comments Off

DotSpots at South by Southwest (SXSW) and the Computer Assisted Reporting Conference (CAR2010) Share Buzz It

Please join us at one of our upcoming events for a hands-on demo and to learn more about our exciting new features geared specifically towards Bloggers and Citizen Journalists.

Computer-Assisted Reporting Conference (IRE CAR2010)
March 11-14, Phoenix, AZ
Brown bag session on Saturday March 13 in the Demo Room
Shoot us a tweet if you would like to meet-up

South by Southwest in Austin (SXSW 2010)
March 12-16, Austin, TX
Booth # 1025
Shoot us a tweet if you would like to meet-up

These are exciting times for Online Publishers and Citizen Journalism, and we’re proud to be part of it. Join us!

From Blogs to Dots – A Powerful Transformation

March 9, 2010, by Kai Gradert Code, Design, Vision 1 Comment

From Blogs to Dots – A Powerful Transformation Share Buzz It

Blog posts sit on websites waiting for visitors. Dots are distributed objects, connected directly in the context of related articles and traveling virally throughout social media – collecting supporters, improving with collaborative edits, and gaining exposure as they are voted up.

We have now made it incredibly easy for blog owners (or anyone with an RSS/Atom feed) to automatically create dots out of static blog posts, effectively allowing their thoughts to break out of their sites and be read wherever they are most relevant.

1. Turning blog posts into dots

Turning blog posts into dots only takes a few steps:

Sign up for an account, enter the feed URL under “Settings » Feed” – That’s it! DotSpots will parse the feed and create a dot for each one of the blog posts.

2. Connecting dots

DotSpots will recommend related articles for each dot:

Review the recommendations on the “Connections” tab, refine them as needed, and click “Connect” – That’s it!

All dots are validated by the community, and high quality dots become visible to all readers on sites that are DotSpots-enabled, as well as to all users with the browser extension.

We’re pretty excited about this feature and welcome bloggers to kick the tires… please give it a try and send us your feedback!

We also welcome news publishers to enable DotSpots on their sites. To get started, create an account and include the publisher script on your site. As a publisher you will have full control and access to our moderation tools.