US News & World Report

I’m excited to update you with Sphere’s most recent launch on a major news site. We recently added US News & World Report (”USNWR”) as a Sphere Related Content partner, joining a list of premier World News sites that include The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Reuters, The Washington Post, CNN, TIME, AOL News, CBS, Forbes and Market Watch.

This means that every article page on USNWR displays both related articles from the USNWR and high quality bloggers, resulting in more [Read more]

Sphere: Related Content

Sphere Related Content Plug-in For MOVABLE TYPE (MT4)

Congratulations to Chris Alden and his team at Six Apart on the release of their new MT4 Plug-in Directory. Chris offered us an opportunity to participate in the Plug-in Directory release and we jumped on it. We spent the past month creating a custom MOVABLE TYPE MT4 Plug-in and we’re excited to enable MT4 bloggers to add our functionality to their blogs. If you’re interested to add Sphere Related Content to your MT4 blog, just download this file from the MOVABLE TYPE MT4 Plug-in Directory here.

Many MT bloggers have already added our plug-in via a Feedburner FeedFlare. This release enables you to [Read more]

Sphere: Related Content

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.

Sphere: Related Content

Alternative Search Engines in the ‘Sphere

Since Alternative Search Engines (ASE) launched earlier this year, it’s become one of my daily reads to keep up with the energetic thinking and building happening with search engine optimization, vertical search engines and applications. ASE is a member of the Read Write Web blog network (RWW), started by [Read more]

Sphere: Related Content

Reuters’Sphere

I’m excited to update you with Sphere’s most recent launch on a major news site. We recently added Reuters as a partner, joining a list that includes The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, CNN, VH1, TIME, Access Hollywood, AOL News/Sports/Entertainment, CBS, Forbes, Market Watch, ZDNet and several more MSM sites and over 40,000 blogs. Reuters is one of the most well respected media companies in the world (off-line and on-line) and we’re truly honored to be partnering with such a venerable brand with the highest journalism standards. With Reuters, we launched three services:

• Related News (related Reuters articles);
  
• Related Web News (related articles from other mainstream media sites); and
  
• Related Video (related Reuters video) - we’re particularly excited as this is our first related video launch, with many more to come.

Sphere related content is on every article in every section of the Reuters site. Here’s the most recent lead article from the home page as an example - CLICK HERE.

We’re very proud of the quality and relevance of our results on Reuters. Early stage companies always appreciate early adopters, especially when they’re high profile like Reuters. A lot of companies develop product and then try to see if there is market interest. We too did that in the beginning and that is partly how we developed the original Sphere Related Content plug-in. Since then, we’ve take a different approach, finding it best to follow the lead of our partners who understand their priorities and more often than not, put the best interests of their readers ahead of everything. Through our initial discussion with Reuters, we felt they were the perfect partner to apply our “content genome” technology to video. Reuters has a wealth of multi-media assets, great/ timely content and very good meta-data. The combination of those variables, along with the generous support of Alisa Bowen, Mark Goodrich and Mike Dehm is our good fortune in evolving the breadth of our offering - thanks to all!

Sphere: Related Content

TC40 & Mint

Congrats to Mike, Heather and Jason on the success of TechCrunch40. I spent the past two days holed up at The San Francisco Palace Hotel watching [Read more]

Sphere: Related Content

Buzz Tracker & Yahoo!

Firstly, we’d like to offer our congratulations to Buzz Tracker and Yahoo! for joining forces. Scott Moore (who runs Yahoo! News) and his group are smart folks so I think this will end up being a good acquisition for both companies.

I also want to address a few of the posts I’ve seen that mention Sphere and Buzz Tracker together. While some of you think we’re in the same business, we have never viewed our business and, more importantly, what we do as a competitor to the various meme trackers available. That space is well covered and I don’t see Sphere adding [Read more]

Sphere: Related Content

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.

Sphere: Related Content

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.

Sphere: Related Content

OM

Congrats to OM who was named one of the 50 Most Influential INDIAN Americans by Rediff.com. GigaOM is a Sphere Related Content partner and one of the brightest minds we have the pleasure to dialog with about Media. Om has been a tech journalist since moving to the U.S., writing for high profile publications like Business 2.0, Red Herring and The Wall Street Journal.

Sphere: Related Content

I saw some eye candy in the ‘Sphere

If you like keeping up with pop culture, celebrity photos (1 million+), videos (5,000+ hours), tidbits and scoops, you’ll want to check out VH1’s new site, VH1 eyecandy.

I’m a big Hollywood news fan, the kind of guy that buys the map to the stars home when in Hollywood. So, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I’m super excited about Sphere partnering with VH1 to connect their brand of entertainment news to conversational media. Just like technology, politics and sports, connecting entertainment news to conversational media is a natural fit, the blogosphere is full of great, cutting edge entertainment content.

I think you’ll love their new site. The narrator has the perfect voice for celebrity content. One of my favorite features is the site enables users to grab, embed, blog and remix photos, videos and news stories. This is very novel. It’s fun, it’s interactive, confident and progressive to let readers “slice and dice” digital assets.

Our team has worked closely with Jenny Fong and Fred Garver to scope out the Sphere Related Content service and implement. You can find it on any article pages, in the bottom right hand column. Great folks to work with, open to new ideas and the type of partner that just gets it. Congrats to the team at VH1 for launching a great service.

Sphere: Related Content

Cisco Roundtable

Inna Politseymako pulled together a roundtable discussion about Web 2.0 last week at Cisco. I participated along with Matt Mullenweg (Automattic Founder), John Toebes (Cisco) and Daniel Wedge (IBM).

We spoke about [Read more]

Sphere: Related Content

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.

Sphere: Related Content

Link Love

—– Original Message —-
From: “X@gmail.com” <X@gmail.com>
Sent: Sunday, August 26, 2007 5:03:49 AM
Subject: Sphere Feedback - kudos

I want to say a HUGE thank you to you.

I am the owner of the blog X.wordpress.com. To say I was absolutely AMAZED when I saw that I was a related blog to an article in the Wall Street Journal would be an understatement. I was COMPLETELY FLOORED that you guys did that for my business blog. If I said thank you a 1253 times that would just begin to scratch the surface for how incredibly grateful that I feel to you. You guys are the BEST. Please keep up the GREAT work that you do.

Sincerely

Tom

 

*Hat tip to Wanky Comics for the Link Love graphic

Sphere: Related Content

« Previous Page — Next Page »