In the ‘Sphere – May 26th

We added a few thousand new partner sites this past week . Lots of great names, Tech, the Dalai Lama, Soccer and Politics. Here are twenty of our favorite new partners that have added the Sphere Related Content plug-in: Brad Grier; MyiPhone; Slash Gear; Lucky Lils’ Articles Hub; Terra Guru; Whitehouser; Wonderlandornot; MacIntosh; Metaboggle; The Silly Point; The Median Sib; The Digital Movement; CEO Smack; Tours CMS; How to Spoter; Blogging the Dalai Lama; Sky’s Blog; Dean Lee; Roguely Stated; and IT-eye.

Thanks to all these new partners for getting the Sphere Related Content plug-in up and running.

Sphere Related Content Is VERY FAST To Load

We recently learned about a harmless but annoying bug in Firefox. Sometimes, even after a page and all included scripts have finished loading, you’ll see messages like “Transferring data from www.xyz.com ….” in the status bar., where xyz.com is the unfortunate site whose script was nice enough to let other scripts load ahead of it. Our <script> uses the defer attribute specifically so that it doesn’t cause any pileups during page load, and the end result is that it loads last and you might see “Transferring data from Sphere ..” in the Firefox status bar. Urgh. In fact, the page is done loading at this point. The message is a result of a bug (several related bugs, apparently).

Read more

NYT’Sphere Link Love

We get notes from bloggers every day about links they discover from major media sites like NYT, WSJ, TIME, AOL, CBS, etc. This morning I found an email and this blog post on Sphere Related Content from Marissa Monera, the author of female-gamer.com. I thought she really captured the spirit of our mission, to connect a broader group of Internet readers to great blogs.

Forrester Knows Now Too

As if you didn’t already know this, Forrester has validated that consumers aren’t the only ones overwhelmed with too much “irrelevant stuff.” The analyst firm just released a new report indicating that RSS used within the enterprise is an effective solution. The message is consistent with what we see with our Sphere.com users and publisher partners who have deployed Sphere Related Content. People need Read more

In the ‘Sphere – May 16th

New Sphere Related Content partners is growing very fast, we’re adding hundreds of new partners everyday through WordPress.org and Feedbruner FeedFlare. It’s fun to see, in addition to big brand publisher sites (TIME, AOL, CBS, Access Hollywood, WSJ, NYT, MarketWatch, ZDNet, Media General, etc), adoption by great bloggers gaining momentum. We had started to Read more

WordPress.org + Sphere Related Content = 2,000+

The number of WordPress.org bloggers integrating Sphere Related Content continues to grow quickly, topping 2,000 late this afternoon in a few months. Our team let out a collective Woohoo a little while ago!

Since being added to the WordPress Plugin Directory a month ago, over 700 sites have Read more

It Takes Time – It’s That Simple

Matt Mullenweg (Founder, Automattic) has a great post on photomatt about what it takes to build a great business, brand and community. I’ve know Matt since he was just getting started with WordPress and I’m very impressed at how he consistently makes the WordPress community paramount to everything Automattic does. You can see Matt’s post here.

Like Automattic, Sphere has Read more

Look Mom, the ‘Sphere is Connected

Just saw this post by Matthew Sherborne who does a nice job sharing his thoughts on how Sphere can connect mainstream Internet readers to conversational media sites. Our goal is to create a great user experience on partner sites (by connecting them to the larger conversation happening around a topic) and to play a role in broadening the reach of conversational media sites like Matthew’s to a more mainstream Internet reader who may not be as familiar with blogs. Thanks Matthew for your kind post.

Chumby Sphere Widget

The Chumby is a compact device that displays useful and entertaining information from the web: news, photos, music, celebrity gossip, weather, box scores, blogs — using your wireless internet connection. Always on, it shows — nonstop — what’s online that matters to you.

If you Read more

Sphere.com gets Sphere’d

We’re please to release Sphere V1.2 – Mike at TechCrunch has a great review of our site. Major kudos to the team – we’ve done this with nine people . We hope you like the changes, we’re certain there will be more and we’d love our future direction to be guided by your input, so please play around with the updated site and let us know your input.

The idea behind V1.2 is to better align Sphere.com with what we do very well, make connections between mainstream and conversation media content. We’re strong believers in conversational media. We believe everyone has a voice, and our mission is to create exposure for a wide variety of opinions and thoughts fostered by the unique relationship between these complimentary content sources. By making these connections, we’re exposing a broader set of Internet readers to blog content, fostering dialog, empowering people dedicated to create unique, highly personal content. Read more