OneSpot is a new content aggregation and redistribution system that is hoping to change the way in which web media is published. For site owners looking to provide more relevant content on their sites for their audiences, OneSpot doesn’t just collect the potential media and throw it at the site owners–it searches the web with its patent-pending web crawler, recommends the best content from across the web (based on its own algorithm), and then indexes it accordingly.
The site owner (or editor in charge of publishing site content) then decides which of these recommended articles actually make the cut. It’s a multi-tiered curating process that aims to give end users the cream of the crop. While this system isn’t necessarily limited to targeting the mainstream end user, most of the examples of OneSpot I’ve seen so far would lead me to believe that such targeting is a good use of this service. And looking at OneSpot’s core features lead me to the same conclusion.
There are three main areas of focus for OneSpot’s publishing tool: holding your audience’s attention, attracting more visitors through SEO, and building better email marketing. Can a web content publisher really do all that?
There’s a few things going on with OneSpot’s service: the content it’s redistributing through your site includes just the headline, byline and a snippet. End users will need to click through to read the article in its entirety. This gives full credit to the original content source and encourages clicks back to that source (think of OneSpot as broadening redistribution channels for content creators). As each snippet gets its own permanent URL which includes comments, having the content stream through your site is a pingback in so many words. As for the email marketing, it sounds a bit old school but I’m personally more inclined to read content coming through my email, because of the convenience. OneSpot is banking on this very behavior, and selling customers on the idea that better content delivered via email is better marketing for you.
So the overarching idea with OneSpot is actually to free up the amount of time you spend scouring the web for good content, leaving you more time to create content. There’s pieces of personalized feed readers, content redistributors, recommendation engines and link love going on with OneSpot’s Publisher-as-a-Platform service.
Already, OneSpot has landed the Wall Street Journal as a client, where you can see a similar approach to publishing outside content as what we saw last week with Bleacher Report and Fox News. I actually think the model that OneSpot is using could actually help widely-read publications like The Washington Post bring certain features of highly personalized feed readers to the mainstream audience, if implemented for that purpose. I’d really like to see how deeply integrated OneSpot’s Publishing-as-a-Service can get, in terms of individualized value passed onto end users.
