people media = people power

I’ve noticed a bit of backlash on the term user generated content - at first I thought it was a bit funny but with a little reflection, I can see why the term rubs a number of bloggers the wrong way. So as Toni points out, I’ve started using the term People Media to describe how all kinds of people are creating amazing content, blogs, forums, podcasts, video blogs…..a lot of folks have noticed and said they like the description - I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Posted by Tony

Sphere: Related Content

week one in the rearview mirror

We’re really pleased with our launch - great exposure, lots of users playing around with the site, many kudos along with some constructive inputs. It was a good week, generating nearly a million page views, which really blows us away. It also underscored how helpful bloggers are about getting the word out - if you’re one of the folks who blogged about us, thanks - very much appreciated.

One data point that really jumps out is the use of our Sphere It! bookmarklet (we’ve had tens of thousands of downloads) and the high quality comments it received in reviews and personal emails. It’s our favorite app too so we’re pleased that others have quickly started using it to look for related blog content to the content you’re reading.

A few questions came up about the difference between Sphere It! and Technorati This! Both products try to give you content from the blogosphere that’s related to the web page you are currently reading. Sphere It! does this by doing semantic analysis of the page you are on and finding blog posts that talk about the same topic. Technorati This! does it by looking for blog posts that link to the page you are on. So if you are reading an article on the new CIA director, Sphere It! will give you the most relevant blog posts that also talk about him. Technorati This! will only give you the posts that happen to link to the specific article you are reading (which often miss or have no results at all). Here is an example (you need to download the Sphere It! and Technorati This! bookmarklets) that helps illustrate the point:

Go To Time - here is the current lead article on their home page (today at 2:37 pm) called “What’s Gone Wrong for Britain’s Tony Blair”.

Click on your Sphere It! button and it should bring you to a sphere results page - I’m showing 1,000+ blog post results talking about concepts covered in the article.

Now click on Technorati This! and you get 4 blog post results which are all duplicates.

This above example exposes some weaknesses that a link based approach (Technorati This!) has vs. a semantic analysis approach (Sphere It!):

1. A lot of content has zero links from bloggers therefore the results set will be zero or shallow
2. The freshest content is unlikely to have any matches or very few matches because bloggers haven’t had enough time to link to the content
3. When there are results, they’re time based so you don’t get relevance, just the luck of chronology

Sphere It! results are:

1. Immediate - we’re not dependent on links - we just look at the content, figure out what it’s talking about and then look at blog content and see who’s talking about similar things but from a blogger perspective
2. We’re showing results for contextually relevant as well as links to the article

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april showers bring may flowers

Most of you know that we had planned to launch a week ago. Well, we were ahead of ourselves. We decided to take a step back and let the new site burn for a week just to make sure everything was up to snuff. It’s been a week, no major issues and we’ve entered a new month. We’re psyched to launch sphere. Here’s what is new in the V1.5 release:

• custom range histogram;
• sphere it bookmarklet that makes it easy to find blog posts that relate to what you’re reading on the Web;
• top queries this hour/ this week;
• RSS;
• community feedback buttons throughout the site;
• expanded related media verticals including podcasts (Yahoo! API), books (Amazon API), and photos (CNET Webshots API);
• expanded related news articles coverage (over 50 mainstream news sites such as CNN, NYT, ESPN, Fox, USA Today to name a few);
• expanded profiles;
• featured blogs for over 12,000 keyword search terms for broad topics including venture capital, baseball, anime, food, web 2.0, tech news, knitting, culture, etc.; and
• a brand new back end that scales.
  

Our two favorite features are the 1) custom range feature (you’ll find it in the drop down box that says “last week” - do a search on mohammed cartoons and hit custom range - it really illustrates it’s utility) and 2) the sphere it bookmarklet.

Give it a spin and let us know your thoughts. We hope you like it.

Sphere: Related Content

we’re flush now

At Sphere we want to completely change how people search and discover blogs. We started sphere by raising a small angel round last Spring some angel investors with halos — Doug Mackenzie, David Mahoney, Kevin Compton, Mike Winton, Phil Black, Vince Vannelli and Will Hearst. We worked like crazy over the summer to build an algorithm that helps readers more easily discover great blog content — and perhaps inspire more people to read blogs and maybe even become bloggers. It’s a simple idea but very hard to do.

The feedback from our beta launch gave us a lot of confidence that we’re on the right path so we decided recently to raise $3.75 million from a select group of partners. Our core group of investors are joined by new investors Trident Capital, Hearst Publishing and Scott Kurnit. We’re very psyched about this group, a mixture of individuals and firms with deep passion to build great, ground breaking consumer technology companies.

We’re very fortunate to have an A+ team around the table. Our investors are complemented by the talents of four advisors starting with our cofounder Toni Schneider along with Mary Hodder, Matt Mullenweg and Scott Kurnit - an exceptional crew to save us from ourselves from time to time.

The growth of the blogosphere has outpaced anyone’s expectations. With this financing, we’re in position to provide bloggers and blog readers with a great blog search/ discovery experience. We’re using the money to build a rock solid infrastrucutre, add features that people want and need (check out our custom range searches, related media, featured blogs and sphere it bookmarklet - all of which, I dare say, are great stuff) and hire a few very talented biz dev and engineering rockstars.

Stay tuned as we get ready to go live.

Posted by Tony

Sphere: Related Content