Austin-based OneSpot is officially coming out of stealth mode today. OneSpot is a tool that allows publishers to automatically discover and publish fresh, relevant content to their online properties. Give OneSpot a list of high quality exemplar blogs, and OneSpot will search through thousands of blogs and score them based upon a patent-pending link scoring algorithm. The highest quality stories get published on your website.

One of the first customers they’re announcing is TheRoot.com, the Washington Post’s vertical market website for African-Americans. Before using OneSpot, editors were constantly searching the web for quality content to post on the site. OneSpot automates all that, allowing editors to spend their time creating original insightful analysis rather than doing hours of research.

Company founder and CEO Matt Cohen has been working with digital media for 20 years. His first job out of college was at the Houston Chronicle, where he had the chance to learn first hand how technology is used in the publishing business. “In 1988 I registered the first daily newspaper domain name for the Houston Chronicle” said Cohen. “Back then the process for registering a domain name was that you had to track down this particular woman at Stanford and ask her for one.”

In mid-2005 Matt started to talk with his contacts in the large media companies about the changing economics of the media business. In short, the industry was trying to deal with the fact that a newspaper reader on the web is worth only a small fraction of the value of a print subscriber, yet the cost of content creation was the same. Matt bootstrapped the company with his own money through its proof-of-concept phase.

In the Summer of 2006, the company landed it’s first angel money. Those early angel investors include Mike Maples Sr., formerly a senior executive at Microsoft, Pat Horner, who co-founded Perot Systems, and Ken Hunstman, a co-founder of AOL. Mason Hale joined the company as Chief Technology Officer. Matt and Mason had met many years previously at a Bootstrap Austin event. At the time, Mason was the Chief Technologist at frogdesign. OneSpot rounds out the team with an advisory board that includes Ron McCoy, the acting CEO at about.com, Brett Hurt, founder and CEO at Bazaarvoice, and Peter Rojas, co-founder of Engadget and Gizmodo.

OneSpot has been busy building their team, improving their technology, and measuring their value proposition at their early customers. Content communities are hot right now, and it’s great to see an Austin-based company with a well-prepared launch in this space. They’re receiving some great coverage over at Mashable and VentureBeat today.

Note: OneSpot is in our list of the Austin Emerging 100.