OneRiot, a real-time search engine, announced a $7M financing round on Thursday. Launched in November 2008, OneRiot is trying to organize the real-time Web around shared links in social media. According to Techcrunch, the money “will be used to improve three key area of the service: Speed, scale and relevance”. Appian Ventures, Commonwealth Capital Ventures, and Spark Capital put the money in.

What it means: you know a space is heating up when VC money starts coming in. Yet another sign that this is a fundamental shift in the way people will discover content in the near-future.