Salon ’sphere

Welcome aboard Salon!! Salon is the latest publisher to join the Sphere universe. They join Reuters, Time, WSJ, AOL, CBS, Washington Post, Newsweek, Major League Baseball and many others already in the Sphere. Salon is an online-only publisher that produces seven original content sections as well as two online communities — Table Talk and The WELL. The content sites, updated daily, include News and Politics, Opinion, Technology & Business, Arts & Entertainment, Books, Life and Comics. Founded in July 1995 by David Talbot, Salon has been widely acclaimed and recognized in the media for its compelling and provocative reporting.

They were equally innovative with their use of Sphere’s technology, designing a further reading box that sits beneath the main content section of every story. Sphere powers related articles from Salon, related blog posts from the Salon blog network and related stories from third party mainstream news outlets - as you can see if you scroll down the page on this recent Barack Obama article. The feature has been a big hit, generating very high initial click-thru-rates, which tickles us all…..another example of great execution and teamwork by Adam’s team working with the Jim Ruga and Brent Whitney from Salon. Well done all!!

Sphere: Related Content

Gothamist comes in da Sphere

We’re super-excited to welcome Gothamist into the Sphere network. Gothamist is the premier local blog network in the US currently managing sites in 10 cities with more on the way. They’re named after their flagship site, Gothamist, so-named after our fair city, New York. We’ve launched initially with SFist, their San Francisco property, showing related articles from SFist plus related articles from other mainstream media news sources on every article permalink page like this recent article on SF taxi mayhem. Click on any of our links to access other stories related to the issues discussed. Below is an example of our module on SFist. As everyone who lives in a market served by Gothamist knows, they are an invaluable source of local information and news with a twist. As far as local blog reporting is concerned, they are pioneers and we’re honored to be partnering with them. Kudos to Jake, Neil and his team for getting this slick integration up and running smoothly. Other Gothamist properties include LAist, Chicagoist, DCist, Austinist, Bostonist, Houstonist, Phillyist and Seattlest.

Sphere: Related Content

Some PR

Josh in the spotlight on Jason Falls’ Social Media Explorer…..he also updated our blog this week

Sphere: Related Content

Connecting The Conversation - NYC Fete

Last night Sphere co-hosted a cocktail party with The New York Times, Automattic (WordPress), Giga Omni Media (GigaOM), Hearst Corporation and True Ventures. The event celebrated the evolution afoot in the media industry, bringing together large publishers and bloggers. Quite an evening. Thank you to everyone who joined us and a special shout out to True Ventures and Hearst for making the event possible. Here are a couple of photos from the event which took place at the top of the new Hearst Tower overlooking Central Park.

 

 

Sphere: Related Content

Sphere vs. The Competition

People often ask us how Sphere’s products and technology fare versus our competition. While we believe that the results (namely our footprint) speak for themselves, it’s worth discussing some of the key differentiators between Sphere and other similar services out there:

• Behavioral vs Contextual - Sphere contextual matching will generate higher quality results on content more consistently than behavioral analysis. Several well-funded companies are competing for a piece of our market’s mind-share by offering related content powered by behavioral analysis. In other words, people who read this article also read this one, so we believe there is a relationship between them and you might also want to read it. This technology is very cool and we love it when it comes to e-commerce and the like. When I buy a digital camera, it’s helpful to see the memory cards that other consumers most often purchased. When it comes to content, however, we think it’s much more difficult to establish reliable relationships between, often, very disparate articles. We also understand that click-through rates generated by these services on content are typically significantly lower than those generated by Sphere’s contextually related content approach, and we think this confirms our hypothesis.

• Dynamic Results Guarantee Freshness - Sphere’s related content results are generated dynamically in Java-Script every time the page loads. This guarantees that we’ll provide the reader with the absolute freshest content. If I’m reading an article and a blogger and/or journalist published a contextually relevant piece within the past hour, this is something that I’d like to see and thankfully, Sphere will provide. Getting back to the point above, behavioral relationships typically takes time to establish, which prevents me from seeing the freshest results, from the source I’m on or elsewhere.

• Breadth of Related Content - Our technology is super-flexible and this means we can generate related content results from a multitude of different formats and sources - including articles, videos, photos and podcasts. When you integrate Sphere with your site, we can generate related content from your own articles or videos, as well as from external sources including blogs, videos and podcasts. Since we maintain one of the largest indices of the blogosphere, segmented by topics, and already work with many large video providers, this all happens very quickly.

• Simplicity of Integration - Speaking of speed and quickness, this is the icing on the cake. Several of our competitors require significant excavation and retooling of publishers’ CMS and website. Instead of offloading the work on our partners, we do all the heavy lifting at Sphere, including the indexing and configuration. When it’s all complete, we deliver some slick code wrapped in a red bow with instructions for implementation. That’s it - signed, sealed and delivered. Our typical implementation from start to finish happens in just a few days!!

If you’re a site owner or publisher and any of this gets you excited, send us an email by clicking contact us.

Sphere: Related Content

Cigars Everyone

Troy and his wife Kate have a brand new baby girl. Troy joined us in 2007, a great addition to our talented client services team.

Congratulations, Kate and Troy.

Sphere: Related Content

Happy Birthday Tony!

Today is our co-founder and CEO, Tony Conrad’s, birthday. Tony is 38 today. Several famous athletes have been born on March 3 - Rick Mirer, Ben Roethlisberger, Herschel Walker, Jackie Joyner-Kersee; a few musicians - Dave Amato of REO Speedwagon and Jeff’s favorite, Tone Loc; plus at least one braniac, Alexander Graham Bell. Not surprising company considering Tony was a college athlete, all-around groover, and well….our CEO. Happy Birthday Tony!!

Sphere: Related Content

Bienvenue Josh…

Josh on December 18th, discussing the best value proposition in widget-ology…..