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.

 

 

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?

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

In the ‘Sphere – September 7th

Despite the much needed short week, we’ve had several thousand new Sphere Related Content partners added in the past week. Some of our favorite new partner sites to go live the past few days with our include: The Constant Skeptic; Insantity’s Oasis; The X Broker; Theology of Nuance; Know Man Soul; Mediaups; Wittman Webweaving; Dust my Broom; Korean Unification Studies; Pokerati and our favorite new political widget this week at Bang the Drum. If you don’t know these sites, give them a visit – it’s always fun to discover new sites using the Sphere Related Content plug-in. Thanks to each of these authors for getting the plug-in up and running so quickly and for letting us know.

We have lot’s of new publisher partner site announcements so check back throughout next week to see an update.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In the ‘Sphere – August 10th

Like our local radio program KFOG, here’s our 10 at 10 list for August 10th – some of our favorite new partner sites to go live the past ten days with our Sphere Related Content plug-in include: Republicoft; Keith Watanabe; The Harp of Bulletproof Vess; Dinosaurs and The Bible; Matt Harwood; Sramana Mitra on Strategy; Truth and Opinion; Diggings; IT Business Edge; Fieltnotes; and Antonioviva.

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.

In the ‘Sphere – August 4th

Ten of our favorite new partner sites to go live the past week include: A Jeep Thing; Blow Up My Ride; BBQ Aficionado; Diesel Diesel; Capital Cloak; Waxing Philosophic; The PD Report; Fit to Function; Clioaudio; Free Press International; and for all you Brooklyn’ites, check out Bergen Carroll by Josh Guttman. If you don’t know these sites, give them a visit – it’s always fun to discover new sites using the Sphere Related Content plug-in. Thanks to each of these authors for getting the plug-in up and running so quickly and for letting us know.

In the ‘Sphere – July

Back from vacation and there have been several thousand new Sphere Related Content partners added in the past few weeks. Some of our favorite new partner sites to go live the past few days with our include: Read more

In the ‘Sphere – June 15th

Some of our favorite new partner sites to go live the past few days with our Sphere Related Content plug-in include: Apple Phone Geeks, Alimadzi, Sublime Wine, Truth&Opinion, Teft’s Blog, Black Educated Professionals, Evan DiBiase, Flim Geeks, 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.

Cool Hunting in the ‘Sphere

If you like keeping up on what is happening at the intersection of art, design, culture and technology, Cool Hunting or “CH” is the blog to do so. I like Cool Hunting because they have cool stuff (no pun intended), it’s succinct, they have great taste and they always point me to interesting, unique products and ideas. I first visited the site after meeting Editor-in-Chief Josh Rubin at AdTech a few years ago when both of us were being interviewed by Susan Bratton. That night, I told my wife that I heard about this interesting site and she said “everyone knows that Cool Hunting is the place to go for keeping up with cultural impact on products”.

So when we decided to Read more

In the ‘Sphere – June 10th

Our Sphere Related Content FeedFlare plug-in was adopted by a few thousand blogs in its first week, joining our list of great WordPress.org partner sites.

 

Some of our favorite new partner sites to go live the past few days with our include: Adivorblog, Grupenet, Zoobos, Ajay – On the Road Called Life, Wiki Music Guide, Diggings, What Would Dad Say, Jim Lyons Observations, The Most Important Blog Ever (nice title!), New Verse News, Right Wing Champ, Make Money For Beginners, My Camera Center, Intowit, and one of our personal favorites Raanan.com for truly thoughtful insight. If you don’t know these sites, give them a visit – it’s always fun to discover new sites using the Sphere Related Content plug-in. Thanks to each of these authors for getting the plug-in up and running so quickly and for letting us know.