In the ‘Sphere - August 31st

Summer is at a close, the kids are back in school, we’re off to enjoy a long Labor Day weekend and there are now over 30,000 blogs that have added Sphere Related Content to their site. Here are a few of our favorites to go live this past week: The Obstructionist; A Rubber Door; Frank Hagan; Wohlrapp; The Conservation Report; Square Oak; Graywolf’s SEO Blog (a long time partner that we should have mentioned a long time ago!); wii4.us; OpinionBug; and Tech Consumer (BTW, congrats Bob on selling Computers.net!).

This week had so many high quality new partner sites - we’re very flattered. Happy Labor Day weekend.

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OM

Congrats to OM who was named one of the 50 Most Influential INDIAN Americans by Rediff.com. GigaOM is a Sphere Related Content partner and one of the brightest minds we have the pleasure to dialog with about Media. Om has been a tech journalist since moving to the U.S., writing for high profile publications like Business 2.0, Red Herring and The Wall Street Journal.

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I saw some eye candy in the ‘Sphere

If you like keeping up with pop culture, celebrity photos (1 million+), videos (5,000+ hours), tidbits and scoops, you’ll want to check out VH1’s new site, VH1 eyecandy.

I’m a big Hollywood news fan, the kind of guy that buys the map to the stars home when in Hollywood. So, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I’m super excited about Sphere partnering with VH1 to connect their brand of entertainment news to conversational media. Just like technology, politics and sports, connecting entertainment news to conversational media is a natural fit, the blogosphere is full of great, cutting edge entertainment content.

I think you’ll love their new site. The narrator has the perfect voice for celebrity content. One of my favorite features is the site enables users to grab, embed, blog and remix photos, videos and news stories. This is very novel. It’s fun, it’s interactive, confident and progressive to let readers “slice and dice” digital assets.

Our team has worked closely with Jenny Fong and Fred Garver to scope out the Sphere Related Content service and implement. You can find it on any article pages, in the bottom right hand column. Great folks to work with, open to new ideas and the type of partner that just gets it. Congrats to the team at VH1 for launching a great service.

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Cisco Roundtable

Inna Politseymako pulled together a roundtable discussion about Web 2.0 last week at Cisco. I participated along with Matt Mullenweg (Automattic Founder), John Toebes (Cisco) and Daniel Wedge (IBM).

We spoke about Read more

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One Partner at a Time

There are a lot of nice posts out there about Sphere but I really liked this one from Seth Eagelfeld at Raw Digital - you can see his post here.

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Link Love

—– Original Message —-
From: “X@gmail.com” <X@gmail.com>
Sent: Sunday, August 26, 2007 5:03:49 AM
Subject: Sphere Feedback - kudos

I want to say a HUGE thank you to you.

I am the owner of the blog X.wordpress.com. To say I was absolutely AMAZED when I saw that I was a related blog to an article in the Wall Street Journal would be an understatement. I was COMPLETELY FLOORED that you guys did that for my business blog. If I said thank you a 1253 times that would just begin to scratch the surface for how incredibly grateful that I feel to you. You guys are the BEST. Please keep up the GREAT work that you do.

Sincerely

Tom

 

*Hat tip to Wanky Comics for the Link Love graphic

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Toni on Wallstrip

A few weeks ago, Lindsay Campbell of Wallstrip interviewed Automattic CEO Toni Schneider. Toni is also a co-Founder of Sphere and I’m a board member at Automattic. Toni is one of the smartest guys Read more

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In the ‘Sphere - August 24th

Here is this week’s line-up of some new partner sites to go live the past few days with our Sphere Related Content plug-in include: Feral Pundit; NoDirectOn; The Screencast Blog; Fitness Solutions; eNewsChannels; Daily Reckoning; Blue Star Chronicles; Metal Lungies and two of our favorites from our partners at Dow Jones: Jamie Thingelstad - appropriately titled thingelstad (the above icon is from his site) and Ados Pados by Rama Sadasivan.

If you don’t know these sites, give them a visit - it’s always fun to discover new sites and even more fun to discover sites using our Related Content plug-in. Thanks to each of these authors for joining the ‘Sphere.

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Ay Ay Captain

One of our first and favorite Political blog partner sites, the Captains Quarters Blog by Ed Morrissey, updated their site earlier this afternoon. I really like the Read more

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Nifty New Sphere Related Plug-in

If you’ve downloaded our Plug-in from WordPress.org or through Feedburner’s FeedFlare, you’ll notice that we’ve update the look & feel of our “Classic” Sphere Related Content Plug-in. Our goal is to Read more

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40 WP’Sphere

I wish this was in reference to my age but the clock moves forward, not backward (:

Sphere Related Content is now the 40th most downloaded plug-in available in the WordPress.org Plug-in Directory. Over 10,000+ WordPress.org bloggers have added Sphere Related Content to their sites (6,000 from WP.org and 4,000++ directly from Sphere). If you’re blogging on WP.org, you can download the code snippet here. We’re very flattered by the number of WordPress.org bloggers who have added Sphere Related Content to their sites - thank you.

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Sphere and Wallstrip Discuss The Next Big Thing In Frozen Yogurt

A few weeks ago, the Wallstrip crew stopped by our Pier 38 office - while here, they had a chance to speak with Toni, Matt, OM and myself - my conversation with Lindsay Campbell is here, including my education on Pink Berry. It was a lot of fun chatting with the Wallstrip crew, great energy.

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In the ‘Sphere - August 17th

Some of our favorite new partner sites to go live the past few days with our Sphere Related Content plug-in include: Pure Blogging; The Customer; Capitol Annex; Matt Harwood; Boomer Entropy; Green Rising; Adscoops; After Television; RewiredMind.com and one of my favorite’s this week given my enthusiasm for our new POLITICAL plug-in - Creative-i (the above icon is from their site). If you don’t know these sites, give them a visit - it’s always fun to discover new sites and even more fun to discover sites using our Related Content plug-in. Thanks to each of these authors for joining the ‘Sphere.

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AOL Mgnet

Early last month, AOL introduced a suite of personalized products into beta: a personalized home-page (myPage); a feed reader/ bookmarking service (Favorites); and a new image driven content recommendation engine (Mgnet). You can access all of these services on the myAOL main page.

Sphere partnered with AOL on the Mgnet service. Mgnet is driven by David Lui’s group. We were approached by Jen Consalvo and Frank Gruber about integrating Sphere into the product and we jumped on the opportunity to extend our contextual matching and mapping technology to visual media. We think Mgnet is a very innovative service - filtering news by visual association is a great idea that should appeal to broad set of users.

AOL has really evolved in the past few years. I’m impressed with how quickly they took Mgnet from concept to a live beta product. I also think it shows how AOL is embracing the web, truly thinking outside the box, 100% original. They also evolved AOL News, Sports and Entertainment and made it very interactive.

Kudos to the AOL team for embracing the web and for pushing their offerings into new, innovative directions.

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