Download Squad

Today, OneSpot has formally announced the commerical availability of its OneSpot publishing-as-a-service™ platform. This subscription service allows publishers and businesses to deliver relevant content from across the web to a targeted audience. Think of OneSpot as a white-label Techmeme, Sphere Netvibes and Digg solution.

For instance, if you publish a site about social media, OneSpot will provide related content from relevant sources that you can feature alongside your original content, in sidebars, headline widgets, RSS feeds and more, giving full credit to the original author and source. Thus, instead of having to populate an entire site with news stories and haphazzard links, you can focus on creating quality original content, while still linking to the biggest stories in your particular area.

OneSpot tracks over 200,000 web feeds to find content in a specific area; these feeds are from trusted sources and the user has full control over which stories are featured, approved or blocked. How content is displayed and how frequently it is published is all determined by the user. The net result is something similar to the New York Times BlogRunner service, with the additional ability to have a branded "Meme" tracker and the ability to enable user-voting a la Digg or Reddit.

We think that OneSpot is an interesting approach to content aggregation and syndication. Looking at their site, the way related articles are collected and aggregated appears both efficient and timely -- a problem with many related-content engines is that the sources are sometimes old or out of date.

For businesses or publishers looking to add extra value to their sites, OneSpot might be a viable solution.