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both efficient and timely -- a problem with many related-content engines is that the sources are sometimes old or out of date.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.
Tired of visiting tons of sites to keep tabs on your friends (or vice versa)? Sign up for a Profilactic profile and link over 140 social sites (like Facebook, Flickr, Digg, etc.) and let your friends view the Profilactic mashup of your web activity.
Your Profilactic profile also has links to the specific social sites you use, so your friends can get quick access to your Dugg stories at Digg.com for instance. The mashup section can be searched or filtered by social site.
Social-site aggregation is a welcome concept as the number of sites we join seems to increase on a daily basis (private betas anyone?). Being able to go to one profile to view Twitter posts, Dugg stories, Flickr photos, and blog posts can make your web surfing more efficient.
News aggregation has been done with much success at Techmeme, Digg and Netscape. So who is this newcomer and what do they want and will they be a valuable top news source?
Newser is layed out nicely, with top stories and pictures on the home page, and categories for World, US, Politics, Business, Science and Health, Technology, Sports, Culture and Society. A convenient, yet sometimes annoying feature is the expanding content on rollover. Great for testing the waters on story importance, but bad for load times and accidental mouse over's. No worries though, this can be turned off in preferences. Newser's news sources tend to stick to the major media outlets like Reuters, Associated Press, CNN, Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, totally shunning the blogs of the world who drop news as it happens.
This is defiantly a website for image and major media lovers. If you are trying to get the top news now, without distracting pictures and a little more text and a lot more articles, stick with the diggs of the world. Although it does provide some really great information, the fact is that blogs are a major part of media these days, breaking news at the second it happens, and to only have major media outlets highlighted drop this aggregation site lower on the list of importance for us.
Download Squad readers are tech-heavy web users. If you're like me, you probably generate quite a bit of RSS (maybe even without conscious awareness). Del.icio.us, your blog, your Flickr stream, etc, etc, ad nausea. We're at a total saturation point for the incoming data streams we deal with on a daily basis and, since there's no sign of the dataflow slowing down, we're forced to look for better ways to deal with it all. Necessity, after all, is the mother of all invention.
Emily Chang writes, "After a year and a half of using social applications heavily, I recently had to revisit the plan to aggregate all my activity into one data stream. As the calendar rolled to 2007, I kept wishing I could look at all my social activity from 2006 in context: time, date, type of activity, location, memory, information interest, and so on. What was I bookmarking, blogging about, listening to, going to, and thinking about"
I'm personally tiring of all the news aggregation sites that have popped up all over the web, and am frustrated and dismayed that as of yet the holy grail of personalization seems not to have been achieved successfully. It was with some trepidation then that I followed James Kendrick's advice (he co-runs the wildly popular JKOnTheRun blog with Kevin C. Tofel) and decided to check out SpotBack, the latest in the line of news aggregation sites.
Right off the bat I was impressed with the pleasant and easy to read user interface. It's not overdone, just attractive and approachable. Clicking a headline opens the article in a new browser window or tab. Rating stories is achieved through the use of an interactive slider; slide it to the left to rate a story negatively, or to the right to give it a positive rating. Interestingly, if you give an article a positive rating, SpotBack will immediately display a related article immediately below the one you just rated, giving you the opportunity to get more information about a subject you've shown an interest in. Slick.
The categories range from things like Computers and Internet to Sports, Business, Science, and even include a Blogs category.
It remains to be seen how well the personalization engine works in SpotBack, but based on my first experience with the site, I'm willing to give it a shot.
The Zend PHP framework will now play nice with Google Data in a collaborative effort that puts the elves to shame. The component built by Google and Zend lives in the top level and not under Zend_service, which makes it more accessible and is mostly because the Gdata service is a protocol of its own, not merely a service wrapper. Google's component isn't the first to be included and follows the likes of Amazon, Yahoo, Flickr, and others to allow PHP developers to use data much easier through the Zend framework.
The new version of the Zend framework is out (version 0.60) as of last week, so go check it out when you get done going through your stocking one more time. The new framework has many bug fixes and features as you might expect, but that is why you can download it and have fun yourself.
