After months of planning, a month of voting (and months of waiting for results), we have learned that our SXSW Interactive Panel “AI 2010: Wall-e Or Rise Of The Machines?” has been chosen for SXSWi 2010! The technology panel will cover artificial intelligence now and in the future, from high tech robots to content recommendation engines. Read our panel description here.

As you know, there were over 2300 panel ideas this year in Interactive alone! We are so grateful to be found in the crowd, and it is all thanks to you. Thank you to all for voting and supporting us in our SXSWi 2010 efforts!

We love going to SXSW every year to learn new things in technology, social media, and gadgets, so we hope to make this panel as informative and entertaining as any other panel we would want to attend. If you have thoughts on our panel, or think you could rock it as a panelist (or just know someone who would be awesome for this panel), let us know. We’re in the early stages of planning and would love to hear what you want to see for this panel!

We’d also like to congratulate those who have made it into SXSW so far and those who are still waiting to hear. The competition was tough this year, so I know the SXSW committee has their hands full, and there are still more panels that have not been selected yet. We’re crossing our fingers for those waiting to hear and congratulate our peers who will make SXSW great this year.

Thanks again for all of your support. See you at SXSWi 2010!

As the UX Designer at OneSpot, I am constantly thinking of new ways for our customers to use the application. With the amount of functionality we have, the possibilities seem to be endless. I have compiled a list of simple examples to showcase the wide array of solutions that OneSpot can offer. Here are just a few that we have come up with:

1) Job Postings - I am in the process of building a blog that discusses design trends and patterns on the web. As part of my site, I wanted to include the latest job postings for UX design from around the web. With OneSpot, I was able to build a very robust and auto-updating widget that not only searches my favorite job sites but also new ones that the system finds. I have found that with a few simple features to block keywords, I can refine my results to get exactly what I want. Click here to view the widget.

2) Find New Blogs to Follow - I’m always looking for new UX and design blogs to read, but Google isn’t the best tool to find all the best ones. OneSpot is an amazing tool for finding the hottest and most popular blogs for any topic. Basically, you enter in the blogs you already know about and it finds literally thousands of related ones for you automatically. Click here for a screenshot.

3) Real Estate Tracker - I find real estate extremely intriguing, especially in today’s turbulent market. As I started the search for my next home, I wanted to leverage OneSpot’s functionality to help me find new listings and news around town. Using feeds from Trulia, Craigslist and other real estate blogs, I was able to create an aggregation tool to help me in my search. Click here to view the widget.

4) Find New Music - Living in Austin has made me appreciate the underground art scene and inspired me to discover new bands. Using OneSpot, I can aggregrate all my favorite music sites to help me find artists that I otherwise wouldn’t have heard of. Click here to view the widget.

5) Track Your Company’s Online Presence - OneSpot uses our own application to track our “chatter” on the web. Using feeds from Twitter, Google, and a few others, we are able to get a good idea of what people are saying about us and how they view the company as a whole. We are also able to help customers who get stuck or frustrated and perhaps turn a bad experience into a good one. Click here to view the widget.

6) Academic or Professional Research - As an Astronomy enthusiast, one of our employees turned the OneSpot app into an effective research tool. Using feeds from high-level universities and trusted websites around the web, anyone is able to track the breaking news and top stories associated with their field of study. Click here to view the widget.

In my previous post, I described OneSpot as a recommendation engine for Web content. While that description is technically true, it is far from complete, just as describing Amazon.com and Netflix as merely product and movie recommendation engines would do neither of those fine companies justice.

So to more fully round out my previous description and expand the general understanding of what OneSpot is (and why it’s cool) I humbly submit a metaphor: OneSpot is an amplifier for good taste. That’s right. An amplifier. For good taste. I guess this bears some explanation.

I previously drew a comparison between OneSpot, Amazon.com and Netflix as a shorthand way of explaining recommendation engines. I don’t want to overstrain that comparison, but indulge me while I go back to that well one more time to elaborate on something that differentiates OneSpot. I promise to get back around to explaining how this relates to good taste and amplifiers.

While Amazon.com and Netflix use their customers’ feedback to shape the recommendations they make, OneSpot uses its customers’ feedback AND the Web to recommend the best content from around the Web. That’s right: we use the Web itself to help us select the best content from the Web.

This works because the content on the Web, for the most part, is created by people. Real live human beings with feelings, opinions and distinct points of view. Whether this person is a beat reporter on deadline at a major newspaper, an amateur blogger, or an old high school buddy on Facebook, these people are not just creating content but sharing content. They share content by linking to it. And as a rule, they tend to only link to content that they find interesting, or more precisely they tend to link to things that they think their audience will find interesting. The key is that a link represents, for the most part, a human judgment that the thing being linked to is worthy of attention.

The hard part, of course, is not just recognizing that links are valuable, but figuring out how to best use this valuable data. Solving that problem is the “secret sauce” that makes OneSpot tick, and where we spend a lot of our time and effort.

Now, back to that amplifier metaphor. I mentioned we use our customers’ feedback AND the Web to make recommendations. The way this works is our customers act as editors, giving our system examples of good and bad content. These editorial decisions tell our system something about what sort of content is interesting, from the perspective of the editor. Given a limited number of editorial decisions, and using link data from the web and a dash of OneSpot’s “secret sauce”, we can extrapolate and apply the same editorial perspective across a vast and ever-growing sea of Web content. In effect, given a sample of editorial opinion we are able to amplify that editorial perspective and apply it to the World Wide Web. Cool, huh?

It’s hard for me to roll out the OneSpot-as-amplifier metaphor and write about ranking the web without getting, well, a little heady. It reminds me of my favorite scene from a very funny movie, This is Spinal Tap, when Nigel Tufnel is showing off the band’s equipment and proudly points out that the volume knobs on their amplifiers don’t stop at 10 like most amplifiers: “these go to 11!”

For a city with a metro-area population of over 1 million, Austin is still very much a small town. If you’ve lived and worked here for a decade or more, it seems anywhere you go you are bound to meet someone who either knows you or knows someone who knows you. This is especially true in Austin’s technology industry sub-culture, where many people have at one time or another worked at one of the small handful of bedrock companies that serve as the hubs in Austin’s many-spoked high-tech ecosystem.

“OneSpot is fundamentally a recommendation engine for web content. If you’ve ever shopped on Amazon.com or browsed movies on Netflix you’ve seen something similar.”

And so, whether I’m grabbing a coffee at Genuine Joe’s or breakfast at Taco Deli or taking in a movie at the Alamo Drafthouse, it is not uncommon at all to run into someone I know but haven’t seen in years. The conversation invariably turns from “What are you up to these days?” to “So… what is OneSpot… exactly?”

In these situations a mouthful of marketing mumbo-jumbo might suffice but it certainly does not satisfy. These situations require a more precise, direct and unvarnished answer. No drone-speak thank you, just give me the straight skinny. Why is it cool? Why should I care?

My answer is that OneSpot is fundamentally a recommendation engine for web content. If you’ve ever shopped on Amazon.com or browsed movies on Netflix you’ve seen something similar. People who bought the item you just added to your cart, also bought these other items. Given that you rated this movie 5 stars, we think you’ll enjoy these other movies. You get the idea. The fundamental concept is the same, it sometimes goes by the name “collaborative filtering.”

“Thousands and thousands of new web pages are published every hour, and it’s our job to sift through that torrent of content and to quickly, efficiently and intelligently mine those rare gems that our customers and their audiences will find interesting.”

The difference in OneSpot’s case is scale. Now, with all due respect, Amazon and Netflix are both dealing with huge volumes of data. But where Netflix is recommending movies and Amazon is recommending products, OneSpot is recommending web pages, and there are many, many times more pages on the web than there are movies on Netflix or products in Amazon’s expansive catalog. Thousands and thousands of new web pages are published every hour, and it’s our job to sift through that torrent of content and to quickly, efficiently and intelligently mine those rare gems that our customers and their audiences will find interesting.

Of course, a recommendation engine alone does not make a business, and that’s not the whole story of OneSpot. Stay tuned for more on that topic. But seen through my CTO prism and targeted to the typically technically-inclined person I’m likely to be chatting with, this answer succinctly describes the technology running at the core of OneSpot, why it’s challenging, and why it’s cool.