About ten days ago, Seeking Alpha launched its new website. The new site includes a number of new additions (you can read about the new version here), including a great new story feedback and recommendation system powered by Spotback. The new recommendation system allows users to rate specific stories as interesting or not interesting and receive recommendations to additional relevant content based on their preferences. Spotback also handles Seeking Alpha’s Top Stories.

If you are interested in stock market opinions and analysis from blogs, money managers and investment newsletters as well as high-value, complementary financial content, you should check out Seeking Alpha.

Screenshot of Seeking Alpha story rating and recommendation powered by Spotback

Screenshot of Seeking Alpha top stories powered by Spotback

The first generation of our rating and recommendation tools was primarily focused in offering better content discovery inside a specific domain, increasing pageloads and visit length. As of today, Spotback releases the next generation of its tools, helping content owners to expose their content to a wider audience and drive more traffic from other sites in the Spotback Network.

Since we opened our service as public beta three months ago, nearly 2,000 websites chose to install our rating and recommendation tools, generating a total of more than 500,000 pageviews per day. Using our new tools, any content owner can now enjoy the benefits of being a part of this fast-growing network and promote their content throughout the net.

This is an example of one of the early adopters of the new Spotback widget

It the lovely blog of the great photographer “Jeff Singer Photography Blog”. As shown in the screenshot below, the widget also has a new look and feel and number of great new features.

Another new ability (not shown on the screenshot) is the full integration of the rating with the RSS streams, allowing RSS readers to rate directly from the RSS feed.

If you want to get the new widget or upgrade your blog from an earlier version, simply visit http://spotback.com/joinspotbacknet/invite and create your new widget.

We are delighted to announce a new partnership with YouLicense to provide music discovery and recommendations to an online licensing marketplace.

YouLicense, the online music licensing marketplace has chosen Spotback as its rating and recommendation platform.

YouLicense enables artists and those seeking musical content to conduct business directly without the need to deal with music companies. Through their unique search engine content is indexed and easily searchable.

The special thing about this business relationship is that Spotback have provided YouLicense tools to improve search results. The rating data is not only used to show music buyers personal recommendations and top rated content, it is also used within the search engine to achieve more accurate search results.

Maor Ezer, CEO of YouLicense:

“Implementing the Spotback technology on YouLicense has given us a competitive advantage and I am certain this will improve user experience, in the short and long term.”

If you own a website and you wish to implement our technology, please contact business relations: dana [at] Spotback [dot] com

Here’s an implementation of the rating widget in Japanese. Kudos yoichi!

This is a really great site that has recently installed the Spotback rating widget.

Drink of the week is a treasure trove of drink recipes, bar tending tips, cool drink ware and other fun tidbits.

In http://www.drinkoftheweek.com you can find a new delicious cocktail recipe every week, and by using the Spotback widget you can then rate and view other recommendations for more excellent drinks.

What’s also cool about the rating in ‘Drink of the week’ is its very unique widget design as shown bellow.

This is a great example of what can be done with the widget builder to create your on look and feel.

If you’re also interested in a special design for your widget, visit our widget gallery.

Need help? Feel free to drop us a note at feedback(at)spotback(dot)com.

Cheers!

The Spotback Team

My mama always said, life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get…
Well, take our new widget, place it in Earthshots and you’ve got yourself a real treat!

“Earth Shots is a Photo of the Day contest celebrating the beauty and diversity of our planet. Everyday we feature the best photograph submitted by our visitors.”
It’s also one of the first photography websites to embed the Spotback widget in it, contributing to our Rate Everything motto.

Drop by, rate some photos.

We’ve begun installing our widgets on custom publishing platforms. Here’s one of our newly added alpha users, CyberNet Technology News, and what you can achieve with our rating tools outside the common publishing platforms such as Blogger and Wordpress.

CyberNet Technology News was started on December 4, 2005 with a goal of sharing the latest technology news with their readers who are just as passionate about technology as they are. You will find a variety of information ranging from the coolest hardware to beta software.

In the past week we’ve installed our widgets on many websites, here are some of the highlights:

Vinny Lingham’s Blog - Entrepreneur, Blogger, Speaker, Internet-aholic & Search Engine Guru.
Caramel*Vanilla- Life is sweet … but an empty dream.
Zeon Music - The latest happenings in the pop world.
Earth Shots - Inspiring visions of earth.
The Late Greats - Home for the greatest songs never heard.
Davezilla - Clean humor, filthy comments.
Opinionist - Political opinions.

HMTK: Ramblings from the Marginalized - It’s all in the luck of the dice.
Bomega - Serial Internet Entrepreneur.
Carolina Sports Net - News and discussion on sports in the Carolinas.
Lef Of Ohio - The political views and opinions of a young, liberal voter living in a battleground state.
Only UMPC - All things Ultra Mobile PC.
Vinod Live!
Anurag’s Weblog
Best Free Apps - The World’s Best Free Software

Foreign sites:
Dziennikarz.pl -Media, dziennikarstwo, internet, nowe technologie.
Testspiel.de - Die bunte Tüte Internet gespickt mit Spielen, Funk-Musik, Film und Konzerten frisch gebloggt aus Hamburg-City.