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.

That’s right boys and girls - from now on you can rate photos using the new ‘Spotback-Flickr Photo Rating’ service. Photo fans will dig it.

The new service allows you to rate any photo you find in Flickr, without having to install anything. It is so easy and effective way to give feedback to photographers and expose their photos to others.

You can rate your own pictures, your friends pictures and any other cool picture you ran into.

Your rated pictures will be saved, along with the rest of your rating in your user page at Spotback.com, as well as in the Spotback - Flickr page.

All you need to do is drag a small ‘Spotback Rater’ button to your browser toolbar and start rating!
Get the toolbar button here

When you use the toolbar button when visiting a specific photo page on Flickr, a small comments is inserted below the photo on Flickr with your rating. Clicking on this comment will allow others to rate this photo as well.

Go to Spotback - Flickr page to find to find the hot photos and personal recommendations to more photos that you should check out.

How cool is that?!

This is an extremely useful feature that instantly connect stories that people like with other relevant stories. When hovering with your mouse over the rating widget, a list of related content will appear exposing users to additional relevant content that other users liked.

It looks like this:

The following features are planned to be released soon:

* Content Owner Statistics. Widget owners will be able to view statistics about their site usage,rating statistics and more.
* Related Content Recommendation. This new feature will instantly connect stories that people like with other relevant stories. When a story is rated, a list of related stories will appear, exposing users to additional relevant stories that other users liked.

More updates are coming this week, so don’t forget to pay us a visit!

The Wordpress plugin makes installation on Wordpress and Wordpress MU (Mutli-User) a snap!

Go get the new plugin to add the power of rating and content discovery to your blog!

Visit http://spotback.com/wp-plugin/about to download the plugin.

As you might have noticed we’ve released a new version of the Spotback website and widgets. Thanks to the feedback from all our users we’ve managed to fine tune the existing website and make the widget just a little bit easier to grab.
From now on, you can grab any widget directly from a website. If you see a rating tool you fancy or a sidebar that fits with your online brand on some other website just click ‘Grab This Widget’ and it’s yours.
We’ve also added the ‘Recent Raters’ feature within the widget. You can easily see all the Spotback registered users that have recently rated on a website or a specific item and then click their avatar to view their rating history.

Our widget Gallery is starting to bloom, we’ve been getting some cool submissions lately, check it out.
Here are a few useful ones:

Metallic Stars:

Filmspot Rater:

TV.com Rater:

Just Recent Raters (and one star):

We’ll be updating new features shortly which will include a statistics chart for the site owner to view!
Keep updated right here on our blog.