ZDNet’Sphere

Last week I caught up with Stephen Howard-Sarin (VP of CNET Networks Business) and Dan Farber (VP of Editorial, CNET Networks and Editor in Chief, ZDNet). These are a couple of very smart guys, true veterans of the publishing business. I got to know Dan a little bit when we launched Sphere this past May. Since then, I’ve solicited his input on a number of things we’re doing or thinking about doing at Sphere - he’s the type of partner that is always accessible and his input always insightful.

When we launched the Sphere Contextual Widget in November, ZDNet agreed to join our launch group. That, like our relationship with TIME.com yesterday, was a major coup for us. ZDNet is an elite publisher. Furthermore, they’ve been honing their blog strategy for over three years, amazing when you think about how ahead of the game they were in their recognition of the importance of blogging. Today, they have over 40 blogs in the ZDNet Network, all offering the Sphere Contextual Widget to their readers.

Overall, we’re very pleased with how well the Contextual Widget is working in ZDNet blogs. It adds an important feature to the reader experience (COLLECTIVELY, THIS IS OUR PRIMARY GOAL) by enabling readers to connect with the larger conversation happening in the blogosphere while also showcasing additional ZDNet articles. From a business model perspective, it also generates additional page-views for ZDNet in addition to adding to reader experience on their site. That’s a win-win for everyone and is the primary reason more and more publishers and micro-publishers are adopting the Contextual Widget in their sites (several announcements to come beginning of 2007). I also had another key take-away from our conversation. Each ZDNet Contextual Widget has a Recommended Blogs section that can be found in the bottom left quadrant. Recommended Blogs from ZDNet is very valuable for creating a network effect. ZDNet currently points to their own blogs but is open to establishing relationships with other micro-publishers deploying the Contextual Widget by exchanging links. This is a very open perspective and I believe the right perspective for engaging with the blogosphere. This hasn’t happened yet but it will be fun to see how it evolves - in the meantime, please check out the ZDNet blogs and let us know which blogs you’d like to see them link to.

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TIME’Sphere

Since last May, Sphere has partnered with TIME.com to link to contextually relevant blog posts from the blogosphere. We were surprised when Josh Macht (former Managing Editor of TIME.com) and Craig Ettinger (VP, Business Development TIME) reached out to us shortly after our May launch to explore integrating our Sphere It! contextual bookmarklet in the TIME.com Nation articles. For a young company like Sphere, getting that type of in-bound call, from one of the most respected publishers in the industry, is a huge break. We worked very well with their editorial and tech team (thank you Adam Embick) from our initial dialog and we were live a week later in large part due to TIME.com’s willingness to be a thought leader in how publishers connect their readers to the emerging, increasingly interesting and larger conversation happening in the blogosphere. TIME.com gets it, creating a great user experience is paramount to everything and if pointing their readers outside TIME.com is important in creating that experience, so be it. While more and more publishers are partnering with Sphere (several announcements coming soon - :)), that was a very progressive stance 7 months ago. And that is a small example of why readers come back frequently to TIME.com.

Since launch, much has changed. Josh moved on to run Harvard Business Scool Press and John Cantarella became the new GM of TIME.com (John came from the New York Times which is another progressive thinker when it comes to digital media.) We’ve played around with placement of the Sphere It! icon, settling on putting it at the bottom of the articles so the reader can continue to read about the topic when finished reading the TIME.com article. This makes a lot of sense. We’ve also seen our click-through’s grow every month as readers become more familiar with the benefits of clicking on the icon. We’ve further improved user experience by enabling the reader to click on the icon and see various options before being sent off to another site. We call this our Contextual Widget, which is growing quickly in popularity with a number of leading publishers (Dow Jones MarketWatch; ZDNet; AOL) and micro-publishers (Techdirt; GigaOm; TechCrunch; Venture Beat; Captains Quarters; The Blogging Times; etc). And lastly, with John’s support, readers can now find the Sphere It! icon on all TIME.com articles.

TIME.com’s contextual widget includes three different types of contextually relevant content to the article a reader is, well, reading:

• Related Articles from TIME.com from the past month
• Related Blog Posts from the Blogosphere
• Recommended TIME.com Blogs (check them out, my 2 favorite are Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish and Tuned In)

We receive notes from readers every week thanking us (and TIME) for showcasing their content. Here is a note we received a few days ago:

“Thank you very much for featuring me and thx for the compliments on my blog! I definitely spend a lot of time working on it. Being featured next to a Time article is amazingly exciting - I sent the link to my parents! I am already getting a significant number of hits just from that one article. The premise of your site is great. You are sifting through the wheat of the blogosphere and separating the wheat from the chaff. And the chaff is a great big huge gigantic pile all right! That right there is a superb service. Thx again!”

Or this one we received yesterday:

“You can tell by my timely response I’m checking my morning mail……! I can’t believe my blog showed up in the sphere it Time results - wow, that is way cool!!!!” Does Sphere do for other publications what it does for Time? I think it’s a great way to present opinion and the other side of the story to balance out the news itself, and put it in perspective. THANK YOU!”

We’re very appreciative of the partnership with TIME.com and the opportunity to work with John, Craig and Adam. Please check out the new implementation and let us know your thoughts.

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Musings On Entrepreneurship and Starting Sphere

A few weeks ago, Sudha Jamthe of Start-up Stories, contacted us to discuss how we started Sphere. She did a great job capturing our thoughts in her post titled “A hybrid perspective: Tony Conrad, VC Investor in Oddpost turned founder of Sphere“. Thanks Sudha.

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Blogs. What are they good for? Absolutely everything!

Including holiday shopping. Just check our gift guide featured blog picks for great ideas for everyone on your list. I’m still looking for a round up of gifts for pets, so if you come across one please send it to victoria@sphere.com.

Next year, forget fighting the crowds on Black Friday and the shopping site slowdowns on Cyber Monday. Hit the blogosphere for some serious shopping. The benefit? Honest editorial. These are products chosen by people, not necessarily retail buyers.

From handmade hats for babies chosen by moms, to eco-friendly items for the green and chic home, you’ll find some of the most interesting and original items anywhere on the planet.

I love the snow laden tree linked from Luxist. Now, if I could only figure out where to put it in my apartment …

Happy shopping!

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New Mouse-over Feature on Sphere Home Page

A picture worth a thousand words. Well, maybe not THIS picture, but you can always see it live on the Sphere home page. We added a new mouse-over pop-up feature for hot searches and featured blogs. Now without clicking, you can see the top 3 results and decide if you want to see more, move on to another search. It’s a little feature but we think it adds a lot to the reader experience.

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Iconistan*

“No! There’s Iconistan. (Have you seen it?)
It’s the busiest new land that we know,
From the big, well know icons that populate it;
To the obscure, unknown icons below.”

“There’s a land where the reader experience is nameless,
And the links all run who knows where;
There are icons that are erring and aimless,
And icons that just hang by a hair.”

“Some say Webmasters were tired when they made it;
Some say it’s a fine land to shun;
Maybe; but there’s some as would trade it
For no land on the web — and I’m one.”

At Web 2.0 and Om Malik’s and Niall Kennedy’s Widgets Live Conference, there was a lot of discussion and strategizing around widgets. Many of these widgets are activated when web readers click on the little icons they find at the bottom of article pages - a space we’ve started calling Iconistan. As an example. please take a look at Gigaom (http://gigaom.com/2006/11/27/wifi-phones/) - You’ll notice several icons at the bottom of each article: Digg, Stumble Upon, De.lic.ious, RSS and more — what’s interesting is the increasing number of places these icons are showing up and how little they do (most ask the reader to sign in, fill out forms, etc.) and, if anything at all, to add to the reader experience. Most often, readers don’t even understand what these funny little words mean. Yet, they show up - you already find them on mainstream sites, and in 2007, you’ll find them everywhere. The battle for inclusion next to articles/ blog posts is going to really heat up next year - it’s already started. To win inclusion, we believe you have to do two things: enhance the reader experience and drive additional page-views that can be monetized.

You’ll also notice the Sphere It! icon displayed with the above list - in contrast, it connects the reader to contextually relevant articles, blog posts and blogs. The ability to join the conversation is seamlessly integrated with Sphere never losing a reader to the dreaded sign in box or a constant labyrinth of links…We developed the Sphere Contextual Widget to achieve the above user experience and business model goals better than anyone. Sphere drives additional page-views (when readers click on the Sphere It! icon, that counts as a page-view; secondly, Sphere offers links to related posts from the journalist/ bloggers content repository, resulting in additional page-views for their site as well as enhanced navigation). Most importantly, Sphere adds to the reader experience, enabling readers to connect to additional content that adds to the discussion.

To date Sphere has partnered with Dow Jones Online Market Watch and Dow Jones Market Watch Blogs along with 50 of the top tech micro-publishers such as Techcrunch, GigaOm, ZDNet Blogs, Techdirt, O’reilly Radar, Battelle Searchblog and Infectious Greed. We’re trying to make Iconistan* a great place to visit.

*Iconistan (the title of this post was given to me by Kourosh Karimkhany at Conde Nast - thanks Kourosh!).

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