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.”

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.

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

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.

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!

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.

We’ve focused on making sure that each of the API feeds we supply comes complete with support for real-time notification of updates so that you can get access to the real-time stream of dots without having to keep pinging us. The real-time part of our API is powered by the excellent PubSubHubbub protocol. To scale up our API quickly, we are partnering with the Superfeedr team, the leaders in the real-time space.

For our first release, we are making the feeds of dots created by users and people they follow available. This will allow developers to integrate DotSpots into other applications and use dots in ways we haven’t thought of. Each of these feeds comes with real-time notifications as well: we’ll let you know when users create and update their dots.

We feel that our choice of Atom and PubSubHubbub make a powerful combination for real-time, third-party integration moving forward.

For more information, visit our new API documentation or drop by our open-source development mailing list.

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!”