Journalists? Bloggers? Micro-Publishers?

Mark Glaser has an interesting post on the narrowing gap between bloggers and traditional journalists. As Mark points out, the distinction is less relevant more than ever. Traditional journalists blog, they write shorter articles, they post more frequently and they invite comments – all things the bloggers first demonstrated had appeal. Big blogs have Editors, Sales professionals and operate more like savvy publishers everyday.

I don’t even think of the big blog sites as blogs, they’re more like micro-publishers. They’re businesses. They worry about page-views, their brands and they sell sponsorships/ advertising on their sites at very high CPM’s. From our vantage point, this all makes sense. Why should the media industry evolve any differently than other industries where we’ve seen this phenomenon before (Music, Consumer Package Goods, Grocery Stores just to name a few)? In our widgets, we’ve already started adding some “micro-publishers” into our Related Media quadrant, thus moving them out of the Related Blogs quadrant. We’re not sure that’s the right approach but we feel like it gives some “traditional” blogs a better opportunity for exposure while not penalizing traditional media sites nor the larger blogs.

How do you think about this?

Sphere Implicit Search

I want to share a few thoughts on why advertising in tandem with Sphere’s Related Content modules (CONTEXTUAL IN-LINE & Widget) is gaining traction with Top Tier advertisers. In the past quarter, we’ve run campaigns with Dell, Verizon, Barack Obama and Symantec. The latter, currently is running it’s second campaign with us – just scroll to the bottom of this Salon article to see a live example.

As we all know now, Google Ads are so valuable in part because users have expressed an interest in the product/ service by their action of searching for that product/ service or something related. Sphere, on the other hand, has built a killer “implicit search” engine. A user who clicks on one of our links, or even looks at the module for a few seconds, has implicitly searched for that content. They have taken an action and that is why advertising to them can be so valuable. We believe this is potentially much more valuable and efficient then contextual ads that are on the side or bottom of the page — where they don’t know that the user is very engaged in that topic. In our initial campaigns, we’re seeing very high engagement/ advertising effectiveness. We believe this is partly because the reader is engaged with the content.

Sphere is now on a lot of article pages each month. Within our growing network of partner sites, Read more

Newsweek in da Sphere

I’m excited to update you with Sphere’s most recent launch on a major news site. We recently added Newsweek as a partner, joining a list that includes some of the best news sites on the web: The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, CNN, US News & World Report, TIME, AOL News/Sports/Entertainment, CBS, Forbes, MLB, ZDNet, Washington Post, TMZ and several more MSM sites and over 50,000 blogs. Newsweek is one of the most well respected media companies in the world (off-line and on-line) and we’re truly honored to be partnering with such a venerable brand with the highest journalism standards. We’re very proud of the quality and relevance of our results on Newsweek, here’s what we launched :

• • *Related articles from the Newsweek archives;
    
  • *Related blog posts from the Blogosphere; and
    
  • *Recommended Blogs

Sphere related content is on every article in every section of the Newsweek site. Here’s the most recent lead article from the home page as an example – CLICK HERE. When the page opens, just click on the Sphere icon link in the Article Tools box. This means that every article page on Newsweek displays both related articles from Newsweek and high quality bloggers, resulting in more opportunities for bloggers to add their voice to the discussion – a great opportunity for bloggers to join the conversation as well as reach a broader audience of readers. Always a good thing. Thanks to Newsweek for embracing the blogosphere and for their unwavering support in partnering with us. A special thanks to Kevin Stuart for his support and for nailing this implementation.

WOW – Link Love

We get notes from bloggers every day about links they discover from major media Sphere partner sites like WSJ, TIME, AOL, REUTERS, CBS, etc. This afternoon I got an email from one of our blog partner sites that shared performance data on Sphere Related Content Widget vs other icon links they use on their site. The data is really exciting on this end: Sphere generated 1,161 clicks on their site in January, more than double that of the other 8 icon links (1,161 vs 544) on their site. A great way to end the week – Here is the original email:

—– Original Message —-
From: Michael <X>
To: martin@sphere.com; conrad@sphere.com
Sent: Friday, February 22, 2008 12:40:55 PM
Subject: RE: Sphere’it Widget

Guys, We haven’t been in touch, but I thought you might be interested to see the use of our Feed Flair links vs. Sphere last month (Jan 08) (Mitigated by the fact that Sphere is a graphic link, of course.)

22 – “Add This!”

27 – “Subscribe by Email”

28 – “Stumble it!”

33 – “Submit to Reddit”

39 – “Save to Del.icio.us”

43 – “Subscribe to this Feed”

62 – “Share on Facebook”

290 – “Email This”

1161 – “Sphere: Related Content”

So, I guess sphere gets to stay on the island another season. WOW. Thanks for taking the time last year to make us this widget and for such a great service!

*Hat tip to Wanky Comics for the Link Love graphic

Connecting the Simple Bits

Dan has a nice write up on our site redesign….

CBS Fans Only’sphere

If you like keeping up with sports, videos, tidbits and scoops, you’ll want to check out the new CBS sports Network site, Fans Only. If you’re a serious sports fan, I think you’ll love their new site. It’s a social networking platform that you can personalize (similar to NetVibes or PageFlakes) to display up to the minute news from thousands of sources, virtual tailgates, blogs and game picks. Fans can free create pages to follow their favorite teams, adding multimedia content such as streaming video highlights, statistics, polls, rankings and chats. This is very novel. It’s fun, it’s interactive, confident and progressive to let readers “slice and dice” media.

I’m a big sports fan, the kind of guy that naively believes the Cubs are going to Read more

Virtual Champagne

Our co-founder, Martin, celebrated his birthday today. Working in a company with a virtual office, the best we can do is offer a Virtual Champagne toast – here’s to you Martin, Joyeaux Anniversaire!

WP’sphere

Recently, the Washington Post introduced Sphere It results throughout their site. While an honor for Sphere to partner with such a venerable publisher brand, it’s also another great opportunity for bloggers to join the conversation as well as reach a broader audience of readers than the early adopter blog crowd that has been immersed in blogs since 2003. Always a good thing.

You can find Sphere links under the Who’s Blogging module in the middle left column on all Washington Post articles. As an example, go to this article – Obama takes Hawaii and Wisconsin – click on the “Links to this article” and our Contextual Widget will open up, displaying blogs linking to the article as well as blogs writing blog posts that are contextually relevant to the article. Here is a screen-shot of the Washington Post Contextual Widget.

Washington Post has been one of the most progressive publishers in recognizing the value blogs add to the conversation – in addition to empowering bloggers to link to their articles, they’ve launched a growing list of WP blogs and have established an ad network for a select group of blog partners. Thanks to Atil Erkin, John Alderman, Brendan Monaghan and Jim Brady for embracing the blogosphere and for their unwavering support in partnering with us.

Jobs @ Sphere

Sphere is growing like a weed. If you have a full set of teeth and are passionate about building web-based applications for all kinds of publishers, you may be a great fit for one of our five open positions. We don’t care where you live, we just want people who love to innovate. Click here to see if one of these sound like you.

A few things that are super important for Read more

Sphere Facelift…

In case you haven’t seen our new freshly designed site, go take a look around and tell us what you think – www.sphere.com. Sphere’s new look and feel is the result of a team effort led by Dan Cederholm over at Simple Bits.

As our business has blossomed and evolved, our Read more

CBS’Sphere

I recently attended the Paley Center Gala honoring Sumner Redstone for his outstanding contributions to the media industry. It was a bit of a Who’s Who affair, Tony Bennett sang, Charlie Rose was the emcee, The NYC Media was in Black tie, joining Barbara Walters and countless stars who attended.

One of the great things he shared during his speech is Read more

HOPE

A company blog is an odd thing. Often it’s just one voice that navigates the conversation. In our case, that role has been mine. Our team is diverse, global and has different perspectives on politics. Thus, our blog isn’t a tool for political discourse and we all know how dangerous that topic can be amongst a large group of people. Thus, this post isn’t a company point of view. But, last week we were approached to run an ad in our widgets for Barack Obama’s campaign. The campaign was called VOTE HOPE. We agreed and as always, I click on the ad to see what happens. This campaign pointed readers to a Video called DipDive. Every so often, something really grabs you in media/ advertising and you just want to pass it along – in that spirit, for inspiration, I wanted to pass this along: HOPE .

UPDATE: If you had a chance to click on the HOPE ad for Obama, you might find this one sadly funny, just click on this image:

A Chat with Alternative Search Engines

I got to share some thoughts about Sphere with Charles Knight and Natalya Murakhver at Alternative Search Engines – you can see the post here.

January Wrap-up

End of last year, we decided to open up our data so everyone can follow along. Growth has been very strong since we launched our first related content application (contextual widget) in December, 2006. January was a pretty good and fun month around here Read more