Farhad Mohit, the founder of BizRate/Shopzilla recently launched his latest venture to the public. DotSpots intends to empower crowds to contribute and annotate content across the web (think Stumble Upon + Wikipedia). The company describes their service on their website as follows:

DotSpots is a service that enables anyone to update the news in real-time with dots, or distributed objects of thought: mini-blog posts containing text, videos, images, documents, perspectives from the blogosphere, or eye-witness accounts from the scene.

These dots appear as a stream of high-quality user-generated editorial content directly in-context of all relevant articles across the web, where they are rated and vetted for usefulness by readers — the wisdom of crowds.

As a result, news sites gain comprehensive coverage for each breaking story without incurring additional cost, readers get to see multiple perspectives and eye-witness media without extra effort, and worthy alternative view-points from the blogosphere are given the mainstream exposure they deserve, in near real-time.

How it Works
Users can signup for an account and then are prompted to download an addon for Firefox. Once installed users can browse the web and annotate and create DotSpots across the web. Members can also read what other users contributed and then further refine and contribute their own views, content and more. On the publisher side these crowdsourced contributions could be syndicated and provide real time and valuable layers of information on top of existing content. As for a business model, advertisements are in the future once it gains a significant number of users. See how DotSpots works in the video below:

Recipe for Success
Farhad is taking some of the lessons learned from his previous exit BizRate/Shopzilla. Specifically, they are focused on keeping equity in the hands of DotSpots employees and not VCs. All of DotSpots employees work from home and the company pays part of the employees mortgage in lieu of potentially a lower salary.

I wish Farhad all the best as I previously worked for BizRate/Shopzilla for many years and really enjoyed the experience.