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.”

As one of the early adopters of our “dots from a feed” feature, the Pulitzer Center is now automatically distributing their blog posts as dots (or distributed objects of thought), expanding the potential reach of Pulitzer Center investigative reports to an audience of millions.

“Our mission is to increase understanding of international issues that too often go underreported,” said Jon Sawyer, the Pulitzer Center’s executive director (view profile). “The DotSpots model has the potential to help the center in its mission by exposing our reporting projects to new and diverse audiences.”

Now, each Pulitzer report can be placed directly in context of mainstream news articles by Pulitzer staff or DotSpotters helping to “connect the dots” for fellow citizens. Once connected, dots are available for viewing in context, by anyone with the DotSpots extension, or those following a shared DotSpots link, as well as for free to publishers who would like to make this engaging content available to all their readers.

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

With this release, we’re also happy to report that the Pulitzer Center has implemented the DotSpots Reach Widget on its blog, providing its readers and supporters with a tangible way to identify the impact of the Center’s great stories.

You can see the live version of the widget on this post:
India: On Remote Island Village, Health Worker Challenges Traditions

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.

For those of you who may not know, Third Voice was a web annotation plug-in that launched in 1999 and generated a lot of buzz… However, by 2001, amid the implosion of the internet bubble, the service, by then replete with spam and unable to find a business model, fell into the deadpool.

Anyhow, the gist of most of the criticism was that, if Third Voice had tried some form of browser-based annotation system, 10 years ago and they failed, then how could DotSpots hope to succeed today?

Our answer was to remind everyone that great ideas can sometimes fail because of poor timing and we thought that Third Voice was a great example of just that… They were simply too far ahead of their time.  The web was not ready for user generated content at that level… services like Facebook and Twitter not to mention Blogger and WordPress had not yet started to make their mark… Heck, even Google was still in its infancy.

The web we have today is far different and we feel the time is right for this great idea to see it’s day in the sun, implemented properly with great controls for publishers, spam detection to weed out the junk and seamless integration into social media for broad distribution.

The big idea is that with the above taken care of, people of all walks of life and passion can be empowered  to share their thoughts, collaborate with each other and help distribute truth of the people, by the people and for the people.  This sounds kinda important, because it is.

After all, we live in the information age, and here in the U.S., our most prized civil right, the first amendment of the U.S. constitution, is the right to freedom of speech, assembly and press!  It is a right to information.

We literally live in a time when information, in the split of a second, can zoom around and change people’s minds; bring people to understanding and prevent wars…  So, there truly has never been a time as ready for the idea behind Third Voice — or public annotation systems that allow great thoughts and ideas to be quickly distributed — as today.

This is why we are so excited to see that Google is throwing in its weight behind this idea too with the release of SideWiki.

While their implementation is significantly different than ours in its focus — i.e. they are going more web-wide with simpler comment-style annotations, while we are focused on helping improve the news with evolving, distributed objects of thought (or dots) which are each like collaborative mini-blog posts — we see Google’s release of a public annotation system as an essential stamp of approval that here is an idea whose time has come.

Having spoken with members of the Google SideWiki team I know that they are thinking the same thing, and together we shall be forging a path to giving this worthy idea another go and seeing where it can take humanity!

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!”

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.

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.)