Who’s In The Sphere?

Check out some interesting stats for Blogs that have added Sphere. WordPress is our largest partner, followed closely by Blogger. Technology blogs are the biggest topic followed closely by Politics, News and Business. The first chart shows the percentage of sites adding the Sphere Contextual Widget by blog platform:

This chart breaks down of the categories of blogs in our partner network:

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what’cha into?

By all accounts the blogosphere is growing like gangbusters. Faster than that. It’s ridiculous growth. Too-much-to-keep-track-of growth. David Sifry’s Alerts says that 75,000 new blogs are created each day–that’s one started just about every second–and the number of blogs doubles about every six months.

So, how do you find good blogs? How do you find blogs that haven’t been started and then stopped two months later when the reality of the commitment sunk in? How do you find blogs that go beyond the mere reporting of the day’s activities, providing both inspiration and support, information, connection, conversation if you want it and just a quick break from the daily grind? You can search. And search will get you a good deal of the way there. But it’s still not navigation. Somebody smart (Jeremy Liew @ Lightspeed Venture Partners) told me that search was created to compensate for bad navigation. Interesting point.

If you use sphere as your blog search engine and apply a little topic logic you’ll be rewarded with timely and relevant blog search results plus a navigational bonus called Featured Blogs. Think about what moves you. Do you need your daily dose of sports team updates before you head to the office or would you rather grab a few minutes with your lunch looking at gadgets? How would you use sphere to satisfy that urge? Start at the home page and in the search box type in the name of your favorite major league baseball team or a topic most related to what you’re looking for, like cartoons. When you get to the results page, choose the button in the right hand panel called Featured Blogs. There you should find a collection of up to ten high-quality blogs sphere recommends that discuss our topic of interest. And we’ve now added the most recent blog posts from the featured blogs - sorta like a mini blog newspaper on the chosen topic.

It’s still in Beta, so we’re looking for your input. Tell us about bloggers you think need to be added. If you don’t see one we should be featuring click on the ‘suggest a blogger’ link at the top of the page and let us know. It’s not a perfect system. But, we think it’s a great way to discover new blog content.

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