Announcing topic pages + new product designs!!

As you might have noticed, we’ve done some housekeeping and redesigned our product pages on this site to better reflect our full suite of offerings.  The occasion and impetus to do so is the arrival of an exciting new addition to our family of products – Dynamic topic pages!!  The existing Sphere products haven’t changed, but we’ve gone ahead and redesigned the pages for Integrated related articles, Integrated related videos and Contextual pop-up widget to better articulate the core value that these products offer leading publishers.  With the launch of topic pages and these new designs, we’ll take the opportunity to re-convey the value and inherent opportunity that each affords.

Dynamic Topic Pages

Our topic page solution combines a best-of-breed design with the latest and greatest entity extraction and auto-tagging technologies. As with all of Sphere’s products, our solution represents the easiest integration with the fewest touch-points of any comparable offering in the market. Our solution tags and organizes every article in a publisher’s archive according to the relevant topics and sub-topics they address. We offer two compelling ways to integrate these topic pages with existing articles: (i) in-text hyper-linking of related topics; and (ii) a related topics box that extracts the relevant topics and presents them alongside the article. Adding topic pages to an online publisher’s online arsenal gives readers opportunities for deeper exploration and engagement while providing the publisher with a significant boost in available ad sales impressions and overall pages per visitor.  Furthermore, there are significant proven SEO benefits to integrating topic pages and more thorough interlinking within a publisher’s network of content.  Finally, in today’s cost-saving environment, topic pages represent one of the most affordable methods of dynamic and compelling content generation.

Integrated related articles

Our integrated related article tools live prominently on many leading online publisher article pages, including Time, The Wall Street Journal, CNet, Wordpress, and AOL News.  It remains the simplest and most effective way for a publisher to deep index their archive and re-circulate that content by displaying the most relevant stories alongside each article.  In doing so, we help publisher achieve a higher ROI by getting the very most out of the content they produce and/or license.  We drive deeper engagement and have documented increased pages per visitor by as much as 40%.  Finally, by syndicating your content through the Sphere Publisher Network, we’re able to bring new unique users to our site from other participating partners.

Integrated related videos

Our integrated related video products allow publishers to seamlessly integrate their video assets by surfacing contextually relevant videos alongside articles.  As videos have begun to monetize at higher rates, this represents a great way to funnel traffic up towards higher monetized content and to make the best use of these video assets.  In doing so, you’ll naturally generate additional circulation of content and higher page-views and ad impressions.  Since it’s all based on the same core technology, our video tools are just as quick and easy to integrate.

Contextual widget

And back to our roots where it all began, we’re still cooking with our pop-up widget, which shows contextual results from various sources in an elegant javascript pop-up module.  We’ve updated the widget to include video results in addition to blogs and mainstream news.  Of course, we’ve also been known to customize widgets for our extra-special friends:)  We monetize the unit with a box ad down below, which makes it a nice freebie that we can give to you.  If you’re interested in installing the Sphere pop-up widget on your article pages, it’s available for download here.

For all other products, drop us a line here.  We’re eager to explore if Sphere can help boost your site’s performance and deliver a more engaging reader experience.

Sphere In Drag

In the past year, we’ve been quite busy launching new partners and a number of smaller things we’ve wanted to build/ fix have been put on hold. Making our widget drag-able so it can navigate all the ads you find on content pages has been one of those ideas that always gets put one spot down on the priority list. Our on-site gave us a chance to take a step back and address a number of projects, the first one to go live is making our widget drag-able. So go ahead….drag us around.

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?

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.

All in the ‘Sphere – Get It Now!

You can now get the Sphere Related Content Widget for just about any platform. Go to Sphere.com and click on the big “Get it now” orange button, you can’t miss it. Once you tell us your blog platform and some other useful bits of info, we’ll tell you the best way to get the widget for your platform (for self-hosted WordPress blogs, and a few other platforms, we have plug-ins, for other platforms we have detailed instructions).

If you’ve requested the Sphere Related Content Widget in the past, we really appreciate your patience. We’ll be sending you an email in the next few days with a link to instructions where you can get the widget NOW, or you can go and request it again and you’ll get instant access.

For those of you using FeedFlare, we’ll continue to support the fine products from our friends at FeedBurner, but you can now install the widget directly without using the FeedFlare. The main difference evolution vs. the FeedFlare is that it includes the Sphere Related Content Icon link plus it gives you more control over icon placement.

Nifty New Sphere Related Plug-in

If you’ve downloaded our Plug-in from WordPress.org or through Feedburner’s FeedFlare, you’ll notice that we’ve update the look & feel of our “Classic” Sphere Related Content Plug-in. Our goal is to Read more

40 WP’Sphere

I wish this was in reference to my age but the clock moves forward, not backward (:

Sphere Related Content is now the 40th most downloaded plug-in available in the WordPress.org Plug-in Directory. Over 10,000+ WordPress.org bloggers have added Sphere Related Content to their sites (6,000 from WP.org and 4,000++ directly from Sphere). If you’re blogging on WP.org, you can download the code snippet here. We’re very flattered by the number of WordPress.org bloggers who have added Sphere Related Content to their sites – thank you.

Sphere Related Content for POLITICS

On July 4th, we introduced a new plug-in focused on politics. This is a really great way to make connections with lots of different points of view, left, right, on the fence. Here are a few blogs – 186k per second and A South Dakota Moderate – that have added this plug-in to their content – I really like Read more

Kicking off the 4th!

We’re all talking about the 2008 Presidential elections, who we like, who we don’t. Several of our partners have asked us to work with them on a plug-in that is focused on the upcoming election campaign. The goal of our Politcal plug-in is to Read more

FeedFlare in the ‘Sphere – Emptying my In-box!

We’re all BOOYAH (that’s FeedBurner speak) over here about enabling a broader set of bloggers to add Sphere Related Content to their blogs via our FeedBurner FeedFlare. Since we launched our Sphere Related Content Plug-in at Web 2.0, we’ve had thousands of requests from a broad range of bloggers. Early on, we built, tested and launched a plug-in for WordPress.org bloggers – adoption has been really impressive, nearly 5,000 since making it available in early March. During that time, lots and lots of requests piled up in my Oddpost (technically Yahoo Mail but it’ll always be Oddpost) in-box which went from flattering to panic in a hurry as the number went up and up, faster and faster. Making the plug-in available for other platforms proved to be a bit more challenging as many of those platforms, such as Blogger or TypePad, require us to be integrated into the platform templates. Feedburner presented us with a great opportunity to offer the service through a FeedFlare, so we jumped on it.

As with WordPress.org, we spent several weeks testing it before Read more

Sphere Related Content Launches via FeedBurner FeedFlare

In order to make the Sphere Related Content widget available to the maximum number of bloggers, we’ve developed a very simple solution that makes it available as a FeedBurner FeedFlare. Last night, we finished testing it and want to open it up to all bloggers.

You’ll find it super-easy to implement – it shouldn’t take you more than a minute or two to add to your existing FeedFlares. Just follow these steps: Read more

WordPress.org + Sphere Related Content = 2,000+

The number of WordPress.org bloggers integrating Sphere Related Content continues to grow quickly, topping 2,000 late this afternoon in a few months. Our team let out a collective Woohoo a little while ago!

Since being added to the WordPress Plugin Directory a month ago, over 700 sites have Read more

Sphere Related Content for MoveableType Bloggers

We quietly enabled MT bloggers to add Sphere Related Content to their site through a Feedburner FeedFlare. We made this available after Amy Webb sent us a note Read more

Sphere Related Content Available Through Feedburner FeedFlare

Since launching our Sphere Related Content widget, we’ve had a ton of requests from bloggers who would like to try it out. Last week, we introduced a WordPress.org Plug-in and it seems to be very popular with the WordPress crowd.

In order to make the Sphere Related Content widget available to the maximum number of bloggers, we’ve Read more