I decided to take the plunge and upgrade to the new Chrome beta so I could try out some extensions. First extension I chose to try is DotSpots. I made my first dot , on an article by Andy Beard about Dell and SEO just a couple of minutes later.

DotSpots has this to say about the project.

Dots are “distributed objects of thought,” highly portable mini-blog posts that are easy to connect into content, share and improve by each person who interacts with them.

When you create a dot, which is as simple as highlighting something on a page and waiting a second for the link to pop up, a reference is placed in line on the page linking to an AJAX box containing your comments on the article. other people with the dots extension loaded can see this “dot” and interact with it.

Dots are wiki like information. Any user can propose an edit to a dot, and then the originator can approve or disapprove the edit. Dotters can also suggest reference links for the dot, leading to news and blog sources relevant to the dotted work. As I understand from the site, the system also looks for connections in news sources automatically from among thousands of news and blog venues.

I’m not sure the world needs another social sharing site, but this one definitely has a certain “cool” fator that many others lack. I’ve been using a su.pr / stumbleupon combo for 95 percent of my bookmarking because of the traffic and tracking combination offered. It doesn’t generate the most traffic, or offer the best tracking, but it is an 80/20 solution that ties both up in a neat, easy package. In fact I rarely even visit stumbleupon any more, I just add a review from the su.pr AJAX page when I bookmark.

At this point DotSpots doesn’t seem to offer any tracking data at all, and its traffic driving potential is unknown, but I’ll still be using I think, along with my current system, just because i like the implementation. There are extensions available for Chrome (you’ll have to opt for the beta as of now to try it) or for FireFox. Internet Explorer, however, seemed incapable of even loading the style sheet at DotSpots so I can’t tell your for sure whether the extension is available for that browser.