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both efficient and timely -- a problem with many related-content engines is that the sources are sometimes old or out of date.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.

Over the last few years, technology news site Techmeme has gotten a lot of attention in the technology blogosphere. That's because it's a tool for tracking conversations and hot topics in the tech blogosphere. Yes, part of the reason we as tech bloggers pay so much attention to Techmeme is because we're self absorbed. But the site has also been a great source of news. Want to know what today's biggest stories are? Techmeme will tell you.

But Techmeme has historically done a pretty lousy job of telling you yesterday's big stories. Or last week's. Or last years. Because the site has lacked any sort of a search function. But today, Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera finally added a search box to the site.

Only the top stories are indexed. And by default only the fist few sentences from each story. So Techmeme isn't exactly a Google News killer. You won't find every article ever written about a topic. But what you will find are some of the top stories (or at least the most discussed/blogged about stories) written about a topic. Or if you want to find every article from a certain source that made it onto Techmeme, you can just search for a URL. For example sourceurl:"http://www.downloadsquad.com" brings up a list of Download Squad stories that have been featured on the site.

The launch of the search tool actually makes Techmeme a site worth visiting if you're not just trying to figure out which stories Download Squad, TechCrunch, CNET, ReadWriteWeb, and Engadget are covering today.

Over the past year, Twitter has become an increasingly important source of news and communication for technology bloggers. If you sign up for a Twitter account and follow a few of your favorite tech writers, odds are you'll get links to interesting stories they've written and articles they're reading as well as a lot of back and forth discourse between writers, writers and readers, and a whole slew of other people. It's that last part that can make Twitter seem overwhelming.

If you were thinking of signing up for Twitter just for the tech news, but don't have the time to sit in front of your computer all day sifting through all the other stuff, TwitLinks can help. TwitLinks basically monitors the tweets from a group of influential tech bloggers and then lays them out in an easy to read format. Each article get a link, a first paragraph, and a link to the Twitter user who shared the link. Some, but not all, articles also have a thumbnail image.

The result is a page that works sort of like Techmeme, in that it gives you a sense of what stories tech bloggers are talking about. But there several things that set TwitLinks apart from Techmeme. First of all, TwitLinks monitors the Techmeme Twitter account, so you'll actually find Techmeme stories at TwitLinks. Second, there's no threading, which means you can't see the pile-on effect that happens when one blog or news source discovers a story and then dozens of others grab ahold.

Probably the best thing about TwitLinks is that you can subscribe to the site's RSS feed and just read the latest high tech tweets from the comfort of your RSS reader. No Twitter account needed.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

The New York Times has launched a redesigned technology news page. The old school paper has partnered with some new school content partners, adding stories from third party sources like IDG and PaidContent. But probably the most interesting feature is that little column we highlighted in red. It's called "Technology Headlines From Around the Web," and it's being labeled a Techmeme killer. (Remember when people used to talk about Technorati killers? Ahh, those were the days).

That new columns is powered by BlogRunner, a news aggregator that the Times snatched up last year. The service does a pretty decent job of figuring out what stories people are talking about, posting those headlines and a list of blogs and websites linking to those stories. The New York Times/BlogRunner are hardly the only game in town when it comes to news/blog aggregation.

But here's why the paper might have a leg up on Technorati, Techmeme, or any other site that starts with the word "tech." A huge number of people already read the New York Times every day. You can't really say the same about Techmeme. It's a great place to find interesting stories, but as far as we can tell, it's primary audience is bloggers looking for good story ideas.

On the other hand, if you take a look at the screenshot above, you'll see that there's at least one major difference between the stories you find using BlogRunner and Techmeme. BlogRunner includes news from a lot of professional news outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, Reuters, and Time Magazine. In fact, there seem to be more old media types getting links than new media websites and blogs.

[via TechCrunch]

Digg has a problem. What was once a haven of obscure, insightful, and breaking news has become a cesspool of dated headlines, generic brand commentary, and fan-boy-blog spam. What happened? Why do the vast majority of front page links come from "popular" websites who feature a prominent "digg it" button on every article? Is there some conspiracy afloat? Is digg rewarding websites that send them a lot of traffic?

Can we demand a recount?

Sadly no. Digg's problem isn't one of cronyism or corruption, it is far worse. Digg has always been a poorly planned community. There, we said it.

To make matters worse, digg's phenomenal growth illustrates its own failure. If it were a nation, we would call it a failing state with a bumming population. A population easily and unwittingly manipulated by the craftiness of other large and powerful websites.

Need proof?

Of the 15 front page articles this morning:

• 7 were from popular blogs that featured the familiar "digg it" badge
• 5 were from popular sites that featured a prominent submit to digg button
• 2 were from popular mainstream news sites
• 1 was from a small town newspaper.
  

The problem really starts on the upcoming page. Here digg's increasing popularity attracts far more submissions than the diggers on the upcoming page can handle. A random check reveals 34 new links in the last two minutes. In another two minutes those links will be buried on the 4th or 5th page having never received a digg. A visit to page 40 in the upcoming queue reveals only one link that has garnered more than 3 diggs, and that link is from a popular website with the (you guessed it) digg it button at the top of the page.

How could this happen? Have diggers simply stopped caring about their own community?

Technology news aggregator Techmeme has launched a new feature today, the Techmeme Leaderboard.

Up until now Technorati has maintained one of the most useful blog ranking services around. By no means is Technorati's Top 100 an exhaustive list of popular blogs. But by measuring web site "authority" and the number of links other bloggers make to a site, Technorati's list has long been looked to as a way of determining which blogs are most influential (which is not the same thing as determining which blogs get the highest traffic).

Techmeme uses a proprietary algorithm to determine the day's hottest news in the blogosphere. Unlike Technorati, some of the day's top stories on Techmeme will often come from mainstream news sources like the New York Times. But if you want to know what bloggers are talking about, Techmeme's front page is about as reliable a resource as any.

The Techmeme Leaderboard is a list that shows the top 100 based on stories that made the Techmeme front page in the last 30 days. In other words, if you break news, or write about news that someone else broke often enough, you have a good shot of making it onto this list. Will this list be more accurate than Technorati's? It's hard to say. But if you're looking for a hundred good blogs to add to your RSS reader, we're pretty sure most of the sites on the Techmeme Leaderboard are worth reading.

Blog indexer Technorati has launched a redesigned front page that would serve as an intriguing news site if you had time to read each headline before it whipped past you.

But since Technorati indexes millions of sites, they have a lot of blogs to choose from. So whether you pick entertainment, politics, technology, sports, business, or life, there are a ton of blogs posting updates every few seconds. And so the Technorati page updates every few seconds.

While some have argued that you're better off going to a site like Techmeme that organizes the day's hot stories by showing blog posts in order of importance and not just chronologically, we think Technorati's system could be useful. There's a good reason Techmeme is more likely to favor big blogs like Engadget and Lifehacker. Those are sites that a lot of other bloggers link to. But there are thousands of other great sites out there that you've never heard of. And it would be great to get a different perspective on the news occasionally.

But Technorati either needs to slow down the scroll or delete some of the blogs to make its new home page more readable. Blogs are reportedly chosen for each category based on their Technorati "authority," post frequency, and use of tags related to each topic.

Ahh, Technorati, what would we do without you. You are the reason we obsessively tag all our posts, and you dutifully respond to our pings in mere minutes (under 5 according to Technorati Principal Engineer Kevin Marks) to crawl our data. On today, your third birthday, you provide us with even more excitement, in the form of a spiffy re-design and some interesting new features. The new design is more modular than in its previous state, complete with standard issue Web 2.0 graded header bars decked out in desaturated colors.

Front and center (well, top right anyway) is the new "Discover" feature. Discover allows users to view the most active posts within set categories including life, entertainment, tech and business. Users can also Discover by specifying tags or groups of tags. Keep in mind that the Discover feature is still under construction, and thus features may come and go before they reach a stable plateau. The new Discover functionality is similar to the popular site Techmeme.

Other differences from previous versions of the site include changes to the way favorites are displayed. Favorites now give more weight to a users favorites as opposed to simply which posts are most popular in the blogosphere.

Just like iTunes did for file sharing music, Warner Bros. is going to start selling movies and TV online. While this is clearly an effort to legitimize the whole download yer entertainment thing, what's interesting is the use of BitTorrent as the tech behind the downloads. I don't think it's unusual though, as BitTorrent's technological solution to moving packets around is quite clever. It's a perfect tech for moving large files at high speeds, as would be needed. Besides, the prevailing theory has been if you offer a way for people to use BitTorrent (or any download system) legally, they'd use it. I'll admit I just don't bother looking for stuff on torrent sites just for the extra hassle it entails. Now what was that about the next version of OS X using BitTorrent? Hm...

[Via TechMeme]