DotSpots, a TechCrunch50 startup that demo’d its product last year, received a good amount of buzz and even a compliment from judge Marissa Mayer. Today, the startup is launching its annotation platform to the public, after thousands of people signed up to use the service over the past year.
DotSpots’ service is simple—it lets users annotate any part of a web page, from a single quote to the entire page, leave a comment and socialize it with friends (You can publish your comments with a link to Twitter and FriendFeed). The idea is to comment on a single paragraph from a story instead of on the entire post and then create a FriendFeed-like stream of conversation around your comment. These comments will then appear in other posts with similar passages across the web, enabling users to become citizen journalists. DotSpots searches through millions of online news articles, indexing paragraphs of text and using an algorithm to determine when certain passages appear multiple times across different sites.
And Dots are evolving; other users can add to Dots as long as the creator approves of the addition. The beauty of Dots is that the comments are presented in each post as unintrusive (but readily visible) “dots”, which expand to reveal the text or video that has been added by DotSpots users.
Dots are not designed to take people away from their reading, but only to add another layer to their experience. To use Dotspots, users can either use a browser plugin/extension for FireFox, or publishers can include DotSpots for all users by adding a line of code. DotSpots says that they will launch plug-ins for Internet Explorer and Chrome in the near future.
Founded by serial entrepreneur and Shopzilla founder, Farhad Mohit, Dot Spots currently doesn’t have a business model (it’s free for publishers to embed the code in their site). But Mohit is truly focused on DotSpots reaching ubiquity by using crowdsourcing to change the way people comment and interact with news on the web
DotSpots has potential to be a powerful commenting system and seems to capture the essence of the power of the crowd in reading and analyzing content, especially when it comes to news. And if more publishers implement the service on their site, it could change the way many consumers interact with online news.
I guess the “cool” part is nice execution; however, haven’t we all seen web annotation services in the past?
I don’t think we’ve seen one really get enough traction. Although DotSpot does have an interesting twist by having a social sharing aspect. I guess that’s the core idea?
http://www.traderbots.com
Thanks for your comment Trader Bots
The social sharing aspect is not the core idea, but rather a piece of the pie.
Here are some of the main characteristics of a dot:
–dots can be attached to any news paragraph and are instantly distributed to all similar memes across the web. Â You annotate locally and we will distribute your dot globally to thousands of similar articles.
–they can include rich media (videos, pictures, embed codes-flash, etc..)
–they can be collaborated on and improved by anyone, but always evolve along a consistent viewpoint.
–and last but not least, the social sharing aspect
Thanks for the feedback
This is like public journalism. DotSpot’s concept of annotating a part of a web page news or the whole page would help users to post their own view strongly and openly. It gives a powerful commenting system, which helps to post their varied thoughts to develop or to promote a change to online news.
Sounds very similar to Blerp (http://www.blerp.com)
The big difference, as far as I can see is that DotSpot requires a browser plug-in.
Also, DotSpot puts a dot on your page when your browsing to indicate there’s a comment, which could be good, or annoying, depending on how you view it.
Jesse
This is a rehash of a ten year old idea with Third Voice then?
Not exactly the most innovative thing ever – and with no revenue model? This isn’t very interesting, is it?
The problem these companies are trying to solve IS interesting. It’s just the execution that might be the stopping point.
I think it’s a solution in search of a problem.
For the first part, articles are intended to be digested in paragraph by paragraph form.
For the second part, the problem with citizen journalism is that citizens don’t make very good journalists.
The ‘algorithm’ is just added fluff which doesn’t appear to be tied to any kind of strategy insight.
Kristian,
Thanks for your feedback. We settled on per-paragraph annotation for a number of reasons:
1. Articles tend to jump from idea to idea across the paragraph boundary, so placing our dots next to the ideas helps them stay much more relevant in longer articles. More relevant dots mean more acceptance by the publishers and bloggers that include our dots in their article.
2. We can match articles at a much finer level and with much more specificity than a product like Google News does. This means we not only attach your dots to the article itself, but to the specific entities in the paragraph you’ve attached it to. If you’ve ever browsed the “related articles” section of Google News, you’ll see that the article topics tend to veer quickly away from the main article.
The “citizen journalism” phrase is a pretty wide net that includes some high-profile organization like the Pulitzer Center (http://www.pulitzercenter.org/) and a number of other independent, high-quality news sources.
Matt [co-founder, DotSpots]
You guys are great at replying to comments. Your service sounds cool, I’m going to try it.
What I said to Leena was that we don’t have a revenue model until we reach ubiquity… not that we have no revenue model whatsoever…
It’s just a focus issue:
1) Get millions of happy users
2) Find ways to monetize usage
We are at the early stages of step 1. If we fail, there is no reason to worry too much about step 2. If we succeed and the product is socially useful, and goes viral, then finding revenue will not be that complicated.
At least that’s the plan today… so, any help with step 1 is appreciated.
this isn’t 2007
Yeah, I’m a little tired of this “If we build it they will come attitude.”
Firstly, if you don’t service a demand in the market which is not already filled by someone else – then you are unlikely to get millions of users regardless. I do not see the problem you are solving.
If you don’t have a product which services a demand in the market to the extent that people are likely to want it enough to pay for it in large numbers, then you do not have a product. I certainly wouldn’t be willing to pay for your product either by micropayments or advertising.
Anybody who has tried to make factual corrections or additions to a news story will know that fixing just one instance will not solve the problem.
Blogs are great but out of context, Tweets are too short for in-depth reporting and Comment Systems work for general discussions.
DotSpots provides a set of tools to Citizen Journalists, Watchdogs, Bloggers and Editors alike to collaboratively improve a news story and deliver their content in context – where the masses are.
As a news reader myself, this is will make a real difference.
And to millions of readers who just consume the news, and are not participants of any social media channel, this is valuable solution.
The “problem” I see is that when I read an article, I also try to find more relevant information about it (Wiki pages, YouTube videos, etc). Maybe I’m the only one that does that, but I doubt it. I think Dots is trying to centralize all of that that relevant information within the article.
The issue I see is that, like Wikipedia, you’ll have fewer contributors than consumers. While ALL of the contributors will use the browser plug-in, I don’t think many of the consumers will (i.e. myself).
…and to top it off, the server-side script that I keep hearing about might not gain as much traction as would be needed to make this truly useful. How many site owners are willing to let users plaster information all over their website (which may or may not be correct)?
So, I see the problem, just not the solution.
But it was a great idea! We think it’s time has come… of course, we have a couple of additional twists, such as in global distribution into semantically equivalent text, crowdsourced edits, inclusion of multi-media, video, pictures and embedded media in dots, and the automatic sharing into social media.
Anyway, as big fans of Third Voice, we think the core idea is definitely worth another whirl…
Hmm, Where is the DOTs functionality on TechCrunch if it’s so great?
our server side script tag is not quite ready yet… so, hopefully after we release that, we’ll be on TC.
I stopped using the Diigo toolbar because of a similar feature. In the case of Diigo you would see comments from *anyone* who had left a comment on the site. So if went to Google.com there would be loads of stupid post-it notes on the page with people making pointless noise. You can only turn them off on a page-by-page basis instead of turning them all off in one go.
This does seem better, but I doubt I’ll be one to try it.
We acknowledge that this could be a problem. However, since we have a full featured twitter-like “follow feature,” we will soon allow you to select to only see dots from people you are following… We have several other filtering settings that we will also be implementing in the next few weeks… (such as total number of dots per page, showing only useful dots, etc.)
Users and publishers will have a set of filters to only show quality dots:
1) show only dots from people you are following
2) show only dots of a certain level of usefulness
3) show only xx dots per page max
Thanks for the feedback…
uh, this has already been done, 10 years ago, it was called “third voice” and brought on a slew of legal issues surrounding content alteration (even though that was all bs)…what’s new here? twitter related crap? it’s nice and all, but just don’t see how it will matter should facebook or others with scale ever launch a similar service (as twitter and facebook are quite well positioned to do)
What is it with people and this “Third Voice” app? Give it a rest. Search was done successfully 10 years before Google… case closed.
Always good to see this kind of work being done. It looks like there’s lots of cross-over with other annotation systems, especially reframe It: http://reframeit.com/
I wonder how dotspot contributes to the open web. Are the annotations indexable, linked data?
Joss,
Every dot (we’re not really calling them annotations – they are far more functional than simple blogs of text) has its own indexable, interactive page.
Here’s an example of what a dot looks like standalone (this is our shortlink domain): http://dot.to/Qme7L You use that dot’s permalink if you want to re-connect it to a different paragraph, blog it, tweet it, etc.
We’re working on tools that will allow publishers to quickly see these dots as users will see them, without any work done on their part.
We aren’t trying to lock up these dots as proprietary data, so we’re open to any sort of additional open data we can provide out of them (RSS/Atom feeds will be turned on soon).
Matt [co-founder, DotSpots]