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.

Connecting the Simple Bits

Dan has a nice write up on our site redesign….

Sphere Facelift…

In case you haven’t seen our new freshly designed site, go take a look around and tell us what you think – www.sphere.com. Sphere’s new look and feel is the result of a team effort led by Dan Cederholm over at Simple Bits.

As our business has blossomed and evolved, our Read more

How To Use Sphere.com

Thanks Anne for pulling together this tutorial on some tips on how to use Sphere. Nice!

Sphere.com gets Sphere’d

We’re please to release Sphere V1.2 – Mike at TechCrunch has a great review of our site. Major kudos to the team – we’ve done this with nine people . We hope you like the changes, we’re certain there will be more and we’d love our future direction to be guided by your input, so please play around with the updated site and let us know your input.

The idea behind V1.2 is to better align Sphere.com with what we do very well, make connections between mainstream and conversation media content. We’re strong believers in conversational media. We believe everyone has a voice, and our mission is to create exposure for a wide variety of opinions and thoughts fostered by the unique relationship between these complimentary content sources. By making these connections, we’re exposing a broader set of Internet readers to blog content, fostering dialog, empowering people dedicated to create unique, highly personal content. Read more

Using Sphere’s RSS Feeds

Anne Hennegar, author of Productivity Portfolio has created a great video that demonstrates how to subscribe to a Sphere RSS feed. View the video.

Feeling advanced? Some tips for searching the ‘Sphere.

Wanted to share some thought on how best to search the blogosphere with Sphere.

Feeling advanced? Try our “advanced syntax.” If you’re an old hand at Web search, you’ll have no trouble getting the most out of Sphere. We support quotes for phrase searching, Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT), minus for exclusion, and a few additional features too. You can access a full list of ideas on our Tips page.

There are oodles of ways to put these features together, keeping you entertained for hours. Or, if you’re so inclined, you can use these features to do some serious blogosphere mining.

Please send us any hot search tips that we can share with fellow users.

New Mouse-over Feature on Sphere Home Page

A picture worth a thousand words. Well, maybe not THIS picture, but you can always see it live on the Sphere home page. We added a new mouse-over pop-up feature for hot searches and featured blogs. Now without clicking, you can see the top 3 results and decide if you want to see more, move on to another search. It’s a little feature but we think it adds a lot to the reader experience.

Sphere’s new home page

We’ve been really pleased with the traction our site has gained in its first five months, much better than we imagined when we launched. Users really like the high quality results and the intuitive, simple web site design. We appreciate all the support and great feedback we’ve gotten. Today, Sphere is launching a new home page design as well as revamping how blog posts and related media items are integrated and displayed. Our goal is to create an even better, more intuitive experience.

What you’ll see is that we’ve moved some of the discovery tools from inside the site onto the home page, so it’s easier to get to blog posts, featured blogs and related media right from the start as well as change course on what you’re looking for from whenever you are in the site.

For example, on the home page, type Politics into the search box and choose blog posts. Wham! You’re on the results page in a flash with blog posts, related news and top-notch blogs focused on politics right there in front of you. Click away on what interests you or go back up to the search box and type in Gadgets or Chicago Bears. In an instant you have another set of comprehensive results ready for your discovery.

The other thing you won’t help but notice is the spotlight on Sphere’s contextual widget. While we’ve always felt the Sphere It! app was a way-cool-tool more people needed to know about, we couldn’t have guessed at what a runaway success it would be with bloggers as well as online publishers.

The contextual widget takes the Sphere It! app one step further to help online mainstream media and micro publishers tap into the blogosphere as well as promote their own articles and pull in their own blogs or make recommendations out to related blogs. Check out the sites rolling out the Sphere contextual widget to see it in action.

What may seem like small changes are expected to have a big impact on how quickly readers can get to what interests them. We think this is a better reader experience and we hope you will too. Special recognition to the AWESOME team at Mule who helped us navigate to our new site. Let us know what you think about the home page, display changes and the widget when you get a chance. We thank you for your feedback to date and for helping Sphere evolve.

Sphere Featured Blogs

Walking back from community camp last week I had a chance to think about what’s changed in the past 10 years. After all, 2006 is the new 1996 and people are leaning forward again with the twinkle of possibility in their eyes.

Lots of other “C” words have come around – content and commerce among them, and some of the tools are new (blogs being foremost in my mind), but none of the words carry as much weight and have as much power to influence as community. Just as usenet newsgroups, bulletin boards and chat rooms enabled us to listen and learn, and read and write about our passions and our interests, blogs are giving both writers and readers new and interesting ways to share knowledge and support, gain fame and fortune, or just get their message out there. We live in a fast-moving, disposable society where jobs, friends, even spouses come and go in ever-quickening cycles. But, at the end of the day we all need meaningful connection with others. The blogosphere affords us all tremendous opportunities to find other people seeking the same connection we are, around the things we love the most. Finding those blogs that actively focus on your interest is still too difficult. That’s why we created our Featured Blogs feature n the sphere site. You’ll find up-and-coming food stars, incredibly talented crafters, astute reporters of the news, sharp-witted political theorists and some very funny humorists (just to name a few). It’s time to lean over the electronic fence once again and open an ear to or participate in the conversation. Community is king once again. (Only, for me, community has always been and will always be king.)

Posted by Victoria