DotSpots is a Torrance, California, based start up company whose mission is to "bring the wisdom of crowds to every meme...on the web" via a semantic annotation system. It is a privately funded company that presented during day one of the TechCrunch50 conference on September 8, 2008. During the presentation, founder and CEO Farhad Mohit explained how their annotation system syndicates a user's comments across many media platforms. Users can currently sign up for the beta version of the service.Official Site: AboutDotSpots

"Mainstream news has incredible reach, but its reporting function is broken. Coverage is too broad and the profit motive has made it woefully lacking in investigative and live reporting. We aim to fix that by providing ordinary people a tool to annotate news articles with information they feel is useful, whether created by themselves or sourced from anywhere on the Internet. In this way, the wisdom of crowds will help enrich and improve the news."—DotSpots CEO and co-founder Farhad MohitTechCrunch50: Press Release: DotSpots Brings... (September 8, 2008) (43.41 kB PDF)