Sphere goes live on Wordpress.com blogs!

We 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.

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