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Sphere goes live on Wordpress.com blogs!

April 26, 2008 · Print This Article

picture-7.pngWe went live today with one of the more exciting partnerships since starting Sphere. We’re now displaying related content on all hosted Wordpress.com blogs. Martin, Steve & Co, together with the guys at Automattic, put forth a Yeoman’s effort to get this running smoothly…..not an easy task. As Matt said in his post, there will be a number of needed tweaks that will surface to make this application work well with a very broad range of content. But it’s a start and it’s nice to finally make our service available to the WordPress.com community that has been very vocal in their support to add Sphere Related Content to their blogs. A Sphere-powered module resides beneath posts on all Wordpress.com index pages showing related articles from three sources: from the author of that article, from across the Wordpress community, and from sources in our mainstream media index.

This is really cool for Wordpress because it’s one of the first examples of a network of their size and scope leveraging the power of their community to circulate content between blogs. It’s also great for individual bloggers, because it gives them the opportunity to highlight and syndicate their content, both internally on their own sites and across the broader Wordpress platform. Wordpress has grown to become one of the largest domains on the web with 140M uniques and 700M monthly page views at last count. That’s serious business and so we’re super psyched to be working with them! It also doesn’t hurt that they’re a fellow True Ventures portfolio company :) Many thanks to Raanan, M@, Barry and Toni for helping push this forward for us. Matt has more to say about the partnership here.

Written by Josh Guttman · Filed Under Automattic, Martin, Steve Neiker, Toni Schneider, WordPress 
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Comments

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12 Responses to “Sphere goes live on Wordpress.com blogs!”

  1. Gems on April 26th, 2008 2:34 pm

    But is still can’t get the widget on wordpress.com…

    I get directed to a site to “let wordpress know”… ??

  2. Rahman Alwi on May 13th, 2008 1:43 pm

    That is a great news for wordpress.com users.

    But, I am still having some issues with the widget, hope it will be okay soon.

  3. Jess on June 3rd, 2008 4:55 pm

    Thanks for providing this cool widget.

    I am using it for my wordpress blog and it works just fine

  4. Shopping Blog on June 5th, 2008 9:37 pm

    nice idea good for wordpress but i can not find the widget at wordpress plugins

  5. publicidad en internet on June 8th, 2008 5:09 pm

    Good News. Online visibility will increase for all the WordPress community with this good tool.

  6. srikanth on June 20th, 2008 2:55 pm

    Nice, its good for wordpress lovers

  7. wylisa on June 21st, 2008 4:53 pm

    Awesome tool -thanks guys! I just installed. I found a plugin here:

    http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/sphere-related-content/

    Easy to install – I did find an issue with the default styling which may be due to my css settings. On mouse hover the text link slid under the sphere logo. I fixed the the glitch this way:

    plugins>Sphere Related Content>edit>

    was

    A.iconsphere {
    background: url(http://www.sphere.com/images/sphereicon.gif) top left no-repeat;
    padding-left: 20px;
    padding-bottom: 10px;
    font-size: 10px;
    white-space: nowrap;
    }

    my fix

    a.iconsphere {
    background: url(http://www.sphere.com/images/sphereicon.gif) top left no-repeat;
    padding-left: 20px;
    padding-bottom: 10px;
    font-size: 12px;
    text-decoration: none;
    white-space: nowrap;
    }
    a:hover.iconsphere {
    background: url(http://www.sphere.com/images/sphereicon.gif) top left no-repeat;
    padding-left: 20px;
    padding-bottom: 10px;
    font-size: 12px;
    text-decoration: underline;
    color: #FF8000;
    white-space: nowrap;
    }

  8. alex on July 15th, 2008 9:32 pm

    I would love to find out how to add the widget to my wordpress.com hosted blog. I suspect people hosting their own wordpress page are finding this widget useful and easy to use but does anyone have any suggestions for someone in my position?

  9. austin on November 4th, 2008 4:38 am

    it’s a good related post widget for wordpress blog. it will make reader more easy to find related articles.

  10. Brian Pasch on January 26th, 2009 6:12 am

    I have a number of Wordpress blogs so this is great news…

  11. Andy on May 27th, 2009 12:20 am

    Thanks guys. I will get this installed on our fast411.com blog. Appreciate the work!!!

  12. badbreath halitosis on August 30th, 2009 9:10 pm

    This is a brilliant news, i will be using on my wordpress blogs