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

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

LOLCATS, Lindsay & Matt

Lindsay Campbell of Wallstrip has a great interview with Matt - you can check it our here. Matt is an Adviser to Sphere. I especially like the ending - worth watching the whole interview They cover Matt’s marital status, LOLCATS and they conveniently skipped their WII session. Matt is an Adviser to Sphere and one of the people around the table that makes us smarter about our focus and product.

Sphere: Related Content

WP’sphere

It’s not our 5oth birthday nor our 50th anything. But Sphere Related Content is now one of the 50th most downloaded WordPress.org plug-ins after being available in the new WordPress.org Plug-in Directory for only 2 months. Over 5,000+ WordPress.org bloggers have added Sphere Related Content to their sites (2,200++ from WP.org and 3,100 directly from Sphere.com) . Thanks WordPress.org bloggers!

Sphere: Related Content

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

WordPress.org Bloggers Getting The Word Out

A couple of weeks ago, we made our Sphere Related Content plug-in available to all WordPress.org bloggers. It’s gotten a great reception so far. As of yesterday, over 1,000 WordPress.org bloggers have implemented the plug-in on their sites. So far, we’ve gotten a number of emails in addition to the comments left on the WordPress.org Plug-in Directory - pretty cool. Read more

Sphere: Related Content

Oh Ghosh!

 

 

 

“Sphere It is very simple to install and a breeze to use. Just drop into your plugins directory and activate through your control panel.”

Mark Ghosh wrote a nice, very thorough piece on our recently released WordPress Sphere It Related Content Plug-in. Thx Mark.

Sphere: Related Content

Sphere It Plug-in for WordPress.org Bloggers

We recently released a plug-in for WordPress Self Hosted blogs. If you’re interested to add Sphere It to your WordPress Self Hosted blog, just download this file from the WordPress Plug-in Directory by clicking here. Then log-in to your blog’s admin panel, go to the Plug-ins tab and activate the Sphere It Contextual Widget. That’s really it.

A read-me is also included. You’ll find it super-easy to implement. A small sample of comments include:

• “I must say it’s a wonderful piece of widget!”
• “It’s working like a charm.”
• “Thanks very much for the Sphere wordpress plug-in, incredibly simple to implement. Truly a great product you guys have made and I am very glad to have it.”
• “I really think that it’s a great tool to sort out relevant news among myriads of post out there.”
• “The installation was as easy as it could get”
• “The Sphere It widget rocks. Not only do my readers get more context, but the changing results are an awesome update for me about things I’m interested in writing about.”

We’d love to get your feedback and we’re looking forward to seeing the widget on your blog. Please let us know if you put it on your site or if you have any questions or issues in getting the plug-in to work. Also, please note the plug-in works well on posts that are about topics that are being actively discussed in the blogosphere.

Sphere: Related Content