We’re heading out to the Online News Association Conference in San Francisco. We’re super excited that we’re exhibiting this year! If you are headed out to ONA09 too, come check out our booth! We’ll have reps there to answer any questions about content aggregation and curation or set you up with a free trial.

We’ll also be following the #ONA09 conversation on Twitter with our @onespot account.

See you at ONA09!

There is only two days left to vote on our SXSW panels (also known as #sxsw). Voting ends Friday, September 4th! Get those votes in to ensure SXSWi rocks this year!

Voting is super easy: start voting for and commenting on our panels!

We have panels ranging from Artificial Intelligence to Twitter Power to the great Newspapers vs. Content Aggregators Fight Night!

Vote now!

If you have a panel in contention, let us know! @ reply us on our twitter accounts and we’ll vote for you too! Our Twitter accounts are @onespot, @onespot_law, @onespot_health, and @onespot_fashion.

So get out (on your computer) and vote! Voting ends September 4th!

See you at SXSW 2010 and thanks for your support!

As voting for panels continue, we’ll focus on one of our panels every day. Today, it’s a technology and content panel: Newspapers vs. Content Aggregators: Fight Night! (You know you want to see what goes down between big media and aggregators!)

Panel Description

Possible Panelists

Questions this panel will answer

VOTE FOR THIS PANEL

We are so excited to plan this panel and the other 6 we have submitted. We hope you like them enough to vote and attend! Voting ends September 4th!

See you at SXSW 2010 and thanks for your support!

The working title for this post was “The Mouse That Roared,” a riff on the mascot of ESPN’s majority owner, Disney. But there’s nothing mouse-like about ESPN. And, unlike the film of the same title, ESPN isn’t marching on newspapers’ turf with white flags at the ready. The 30-year-old network calls itself the “Worldwide Leader in Sports,” a nearly irrefutable claim when one tallies the Borg-like reach of its cable channels, local radio affiliates, blogs, international sites and more.

Accordingly, tremors from Sunday’s news that ESPN is adding local sports coverage – with plans to go hyper-local (think softball leagues) – have rippled well beyond editors’ offices. With local readers and ad dollars in the crosshairs of sports media’s biggest, best-funded promotional howitzer, this is a vastly bigger worry for newspapers than Google News’ parasitical attributes.

Why? Consider this stat from the Times story: “In less than three months, ESPN Chicago has become the city’s top sports site, attracting about 590,000 unique visitors in June… Second place went to the Tribune’s online sports section with 455,000 unique visitors.”

What’s amazing is not that it happened, it’s the velocity with which it happened. The Tribune has been the authority on Chicago sports for 162 years; ESPN only needed three months to undo that.

And it’s not just the sports desk that should be worried. Last month, the Huffington Post announced its plans to expand into local news. Resistance is futile.

Of course, competition from ESPN, HuffPo and other national outlets isn’t news to newspapers, which have traditionally relied on the defense that national outlets lack the well-sourced local beat reporters to compete head to head.

Until now,as Dan Shanoff notes:

Indeed, ESPN has been poaching talent from local papers for years, a trend exacerbated by local newsrooms’ collapsing budgets. Now, it appears, these chickens have come home to roost.

Fortunately for newspapers, this is a war that can be waged on the cheap. According to the Times article, ESPN primarily will use existing resources and need only 15 new staff members to run the Dallas, Los Angeles and New York properties.

How is going local such a high-leverage move for ESPN, HuffPo, et al? In a word, aggregation. Check out ESPN’s Rumor Central pages, where ESPN culls non-ESPN content by topic area, bundles it with internally-generated content, and charges its “Insiders” subscribers for access. Per Shanoff:

Actually, it can be more efficient, scalable and effective than that. Just ask OneSpot clients like the Wall Street Journal, the Houston Chronicle, the San Francisco Chronicle or others. Instead of relying solely on the selection of a single editor, blogger or intern, these organizations tap into the hive mind of thousands of editors, bloggers, Twitterers and others who link to the best of the web. The key is quality content aggregation with smart curation to select the best of the best. And, as ESPN has proven, quality, curated content can also be monetized. Let us show you how.

ESPN’s blitzkrieg into local markets may resemble Amazon.com’s takeover of so many retail categories. Both are category-killer brands executing ruthlessly clever online strategies while incumbents, beholden to brick-and-mortar interests and budgets, struggle to keep up. But ESPN is winning by outsmarting, rather than outspending. With nimbleness and creativity, newspapers can fight fire with fire.

There’s a new issue of the Health Spotlight: the biweekly email newsletter highlighting the best health stories from around the web, found automatically by OneSpot from over 500,000 different sources.

This issue’s stories include:

• Want Tylenol? You May Need Rx

• As 23 states get even fatter, heavy costs loom

• Pundits Ponder Whether Palin Had Postpartum Depression

• Vegetarians ‘avoid more cancers’

To read these stories and more, check out our newsletter: Health Spotlight

Not yet subscribed? Sign up now to Get the Spotlight for our Health, Fashion, Law, or Social Media Marketing Newsletters.

With the democratization of content production tools, there are so many content producers posting to the web. The supply of content is increasing exponentially. It becomes impossible to consume it all, just as it becomes impossible to keep up with the demand of content production. When I talk about OneSpot, our content curation tool, and presenting the best of the Web to a target audience, the process comes down to 3 steps: aggregate, filter, and prioritize.

Aggregate: Ag”gre*gate\, v. To bring together; to collect into a mass or sum. (Websters)

Filter: Fil”ter\, v. To remove by passing through a filter: filter out impurities. (American Heritage)

Prioritize: prī-ôr’ĭ-tīz’, v. To arrange or deal with in order of importance. (American Heritage)

Now imagine this scenario online, utilizing industrial strength technology: you collect every relevant story in your subject area, remove the less relevant, lower quality stories, and display only the best of the best to your audience. Now, you are curating the best of the web and serving your audience. When I talk about OneSpot, I tell people they are curating the best of the Web. That’s because this content aggregation, filtration, and prioritization is happening behind the scenes, without you having to tinker and toil over an overly technical system. Using technology, it becomes simple to sift through the mass amounts of online content available. OneSpot presents a simple Editor Dashboard to make picking the most relevant, targeted, high quality stories as easy as checking email. By aggregating, filtering, and prioritizing, you are ensuring your audience’s experience is as special and valuable as it can be.

OneSpot allows anyone to discover, curate, and share the best of the web for their audience, no matter their topic. A few weeks ago, we launched Curated for You: sites focused on a single topic allowing you to read, use, and customize OneSpot.

We have now added 2 new topics, ready for reading, using, and customizing: Health and Fashion.

On our Curated for You sites, you can read it, use it, or customize it:

• Read it! Stay on top of the latest news. Read headlines, subscribe to the newsletter or RSS feed, or follow us on Twitter.

• Use it! Grab the news widget for your site or blog and start delivering the best content to your audience today!

• Customize it! Create your own OneSpot, no matter your topic. Choose your own topic, sources, stories, and presentation. Try OneSpot free for 30 days.

We are excited to add these two topics, Health and Fashion. Interested in a different topic? Suggest a topic for us to demo next or build your own OneSpot.