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.

Showing the Impact of Your Blog With the DotSpots Reach Widget

April 21, 2010, by Kai Gradert Code, Design 3 Comments

Showing the Impact of Your Blog With the DotSpots Reach Widget Share Buzz It

Update: We have updated the instructions below to reflect our new setup assistant for Bloggers.

With the last release we launched two new features to create dots from a feed and to connect dots into the news. Those features give bloggers the tools to extend the reach of their blog beyond their own domain.

Today we are releasing the DotSpots Reach Widget, which allows bloggers to share the potential reach of their posts. The widget shows on how many sites the blog post can be seen in context.

You can see a live example of the widget on the Pulitzer Center website

Knowing exactly where your blog is relevant and where it can be seen in context is a powerful tool for showing your supporters (donors, grantors, advertisers or investors) how much impact your blog is potentially having.

By allowing them to see the reach at the bottom of the post, and then letting them experience your post as dot in context of thousands of mainstream sites around the web, your site supporters can directly experience the impact that your story can have in the context of other stories.

Setting Up the Widget

1. Log into your DotSpots account, or create a new account
2. Click on the Bloggers – Connect your content into the news setup assistant at the top of the screen
3. The setup assistant will help you with:
   • Adding a RSS feed
   • Auto connecting your blog posts to related news articles
   • Installing the widget for WordPress, Blogger, Typepad as well as other blogging platforms
4. That’s it!

The widget is fully customizable via CSS, with the default configuration inheriting the styles of your site to blend nicely with the rest of your site.

We will continue to improve this widget, integrate it into our flows and fine-tune the types of data we display. In the meantime, please share your feedback with us and let us know what other features you would like to see in the future.

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.

In Honor of the International Day of Peace

September 21, 2009, by Dariush Afshar Design, Vision Comments Off

In Honor of the International Day of Peace Share Buzz It

We’ve written this post in honor of the “International Day of Peace.” As an annual day of celebration, it is perhaps one of the most important days of the year. This day serves as a reminder to all who may be involved in conflict and strife, wherever they may be in the world, that peace remains attainable.

It’s an important day for DotSpots as well, as the concept of a dot or “distributed object of thought” was borne out of an inspiration to alleviate global misunderstandings that lead to conflict. In fact, that concept is so core to our mission at DotSpots, that we’ve made it figure prominently in our own logo from the beginning :) As dots proliferate throughout the world, we hope to do our part in helping to bring about global peace, one dot at a time.

We believe that whatever the cause of a given conflict in the world, there is no dispute that cannot be resolved through mutually respectful dialogue and thoughtful and open person to person communication. Institutions and media (as the word itself implies) often step in and “mediate” that direct human to human communication, pushing their own agendas and points of view, not allowing human values and similarities to shine through. However, it is precisely the sort person to person communication that dots in particular, and social media in general, are designed to facilitate.

While our recent launch has been fun and we’re excited about all of the interest from citizen journalists, bloggers and publishers, our ambitions are much greater. To us, DotSpots can become one component of a set of tools that peace-loving people (that is, the vast majority of humanity) can use to facilitate dialogue and help spread the people’s truth, humanity’s goals and all of our truest hopes to each other. When people who might previously have never spoken with each other, out of hatred or fear created by institutional forces and media, choose to create dots and share their points of view, it is then that the true value of what we are building today will be realized.

So, on this day, as the U.N’s peace bell inscription so beautifully exclaims: “Long live absolute world peace!” we’re posting to say “here here!”

Share your dots! — DotSpots goes Private Beta

July 9, 2009, by Farhad Mohit Code, Design, Vision Comments Off

Share your dots! — DotSpots goes Private Beta Share Buzz It

We have had a ton of feedback during our closed alpha phase which has resulted in a core feature set which we will be releasing to our beta sign-ups on a rolling basis.

Today, a new object called a dot (or “distributed object of thought”) is born!

Dots are portable blog posts that anyone can create on the fly and everyone can improve like a wiki.  Dots can be connected to ideas, quotes or paragraphs of text in the news, and can be automatically distributed to all related articles and shared via social media, allowing one person with the truth to change the course of the news!

To learn more visit the  DotSpots Overview Page.

Or, get started now by visiting our Quick Start Guide.

Remember, we’re still rough around the edges, so we need your feedback!

Team DotSpots.

DotSpots has gone Alpha…

December 23, 2008, by Farhad Mohit Code, Design, Vision 2 Comments

DotSpots has gone Alpha… Share Buzz It

seeker of truth
follow no path all paths lead where
truth is here
— ee cummings

The mainstream news is clearly inadequate as a single source for “the truth.

It may be a good starting point, but there is so much more to every story.  The blogosphere often steps in to provide depth, but there are so many blogs out there and each seems to have its own agenda / angle. Then there are the ever-growing live-eyewitness videos, photographs and reports that seem to appear about every news item… Again, these dispersed all over the web on sites like YouTube and Flickr, or on personal blogs and e-mails.

So, in order to get to “the truth” one must follow many paths, links, clicks, searches… but who has the time to do all that?

Well, what if there was a way to view all of the above coverage (mainstream, blogs and live-eyewitness views), in context, as one was reading a mainstream news article, or at any of the other nodes mentioned?

Enter DotSpots…  We allow anyone who has found, captured or created, content, points of view, pictures, or videos that could be relevant to a news story to place it directly, in context, into that news story, and have it automatically distributed to all copies of that story wherever that news story spreads.

Simple as that.

We believe that if everyone was able to easily see each news story covered in depth and from multiple angles, the world would be a better  place.  We also believe that the only way to effective do this is by using the ‘wisdom of crowds’ which is why we’ve have created DotSpots as an open platform where anyone can add his or her voice to any news item.

We’re still in Alpha — internally pounding on the product to make sure that its core is solid — but we hope to be out soon in Beta, getting your feedback to help improve DotSpots so it becomes a platform that contributes to raising the awareness of people everywhere (or raising the Global IQ, as Chris Anderson of TED puts it.)