Truthdig blog partners with DotSpots

July 12, 2010, by Dariush Afshar General, Vision Comments Off

Truthdig blog partners with DotSpots Share Buzz It

DotSpots is proud to announce an expanding partnership with Truthdig, winner of the 2010 Webby Award for best political blog. As one of the early adopters of our “dots from a feed” feature that was recently released, Truthdig is now automatically creating dots (or distributed objects of thought) out of every one of their posts, expanding the potential reach of their content to an audience of millions.

The partnership is a natural fit, given DotSpots’ commitment to getting important pieces of information distributed into areas in the news lacking depth, and Truthdig’s commitment to “drilling beneath the headlines,” providing expert coverage of current affairs.

“We at Truthdig are glad to be included in the list of high-quality blogs that are joining the DotSpots network. We recognize the value of being able to distribute our content through DotSpots and are excited to participate in the network,” says Zuade Kaufman, Publisher of Truthdig.

Now, each Truthdig story can be placed directly in context of mainstream news articles by the DotSpots technology. Once connected, dots are available for viewing in context by anyone with the DotSpots extension, or those following a DotSpots link in social media—as well as for free to publishers who would like to make this engaging content available to their readers.

“We are excited that Truthdig sees the value in people connecting the dots for other people,” said Farhad Mohit, Founder and CEO of DotSpots. “As the list of leading high-quality blogs using DotSpots grows, the network becomes more and more useful for publishers and readers alike, which is a win for all sides.”

Distribute Your Posts Throughout the Web as Dots!

July 8, 2010, by Navid Aslani Vision Comments Off

Distribute Your Posts Throughout the Web as Dots! Share Buzz It

With our latest release, creating dots from your posts and connecting them to relevant news articles have been made even easier!

How to Maximize the Connections for Your Dots

July 8, 2010, by Dariush Afshar Code, Design Comments Off

How to Maximize the Connections for Your Dots Share Buzz It

The power of dotspots lies in connecting your blog posts to as many relevant news articles as possible. If your posts are not getting connected to many articles, there are likely a few simple reasons why this could be the case. Below we have listed three main reasons, as well as some actions you can take to maximize the connections of your dots.

1. Your rss/atom feed that you have added to your dotspots account is too thin on content. It could be a single sentence or only a few sentences, but it lacks enough richness to be matched against any article.

Suggested Action: Modify the feed you are sending to dotspots to include more text or other media. More content means better reference points for our technology and therefore more accurate matching. You can either alter your current publicly available feed by making sure that it picks up a greater amount of your posts’ content, or you can create a dedicated full-content feed which is not publicly available on your site but is linked only to your dotspots account for this purpose.

2. There is a relevant article that you have in mind for one of your dots, but for whatever reason our engine has not connected your dot to that article.

Suggested Action: You can connect your dot to that article yourself. With the dotspots extension installed, simply right-click the paragraph that you want your dot to be connected to, click on ‘connect an existing dot’, choose your dot from the list or add your dot’s url in the space provided and click ’submit’.

3. Your post is lacking specific keywords that could help the dotspots algorithm expand its reach.

Suggested Action: You can help facilitate better connections of your post by adding additional relevant keywords. To do this, just go under ‘Connections’ -> ‘Connect it to more articles’ -> ‘Keywords’ -> ‘Edit Keywords’ and then go ahead and enter whatever relevant terms you think will help dotspots find better article matches for your posts.