DISQUS

Hi all - very active conversation - :)

The goal of the new feature is to create opportunities for readers to discover more content that is related to what you're writing about. We've included content from your archives, from other WordPress.com blogs and for Mainstream Media sites (MSM).

Like any technology, we're making lots (and lots) of tweaks on the fly to get the filters properly tuned. While subjective, we've been successful in making these tweaks on a large number of partner sites (www.sphere.com) so I'm hopeful (with a little patience and goodwill), we'll make improvements as we go along. In the meantime, you're input is really critical for us to make those improvements, so please keep sending.

Tony

Hi all - very active conversation - :)

The goal of the new feature is to create opportunities for readers to discover more content that is related to what you're writing about. We've included content from your archives, from other WordPress.com blogs and for Mainstream Media sites (MSM).

Like any technology, we're making lots (and lots) of tweaks on the fly to get the filters properly tuned. While subjective, we've been successful in making these tweaks on a large number of partner sites (www.sphere.com) so I'm hopeful (with a little patience and goodwill), we'll make improvements as we go along. In the meantime, you're input is really critical for us to make those improvements, so please keep sending.

Tony

Hi All - you need to get clicking!!

Andy - thanks for sharing the news. We're thrilled about the fit and believe it will enable us to accelerate our growth even faster. Yakov - we're actually quite transparent about our performance, we publish details on our blos (sphere.com/blog) - we just did a post on Q1 performance, you can see the detail here: www.sphere.com/blog/2008/04/14/q108-wrap-up/

Thanks Matthew - we're thrilled about the fit with AOL. For us to go to the next level, we want to marry our service with high quality monetization opportunities. We believe this is a Win Win for our partners, AOL & Sphere.

On a separate note, I genuinely get excited with each partner launch, each one is special and there is nothing like seeing your product being deployed. I remember when you gave a candid assessment of our early blog search service. You were spot on in your analysis. Most importantly, you were polite enough to have a dialog with us and that, in of itself, was exceptional. There are many flame throwers in the tech business, most gun and run. You didn't act that way and after our call, agreed to try out our related content widget which was a compliment and made our partnering with you all the more rewarding.

Really great post. I noticed it on a few of our widget partner sites (which means it ranks very high in our index ranking). you can see it on Venture Beat (http://venturebeat.com/2007/12/13/googles-knol-a-challenge-to-wikipedia/) and mathew ingram (http://www.mathewingram.com/work/2007/12/14/is-google-going-after-wikipedia).

Best,

Tony Conrad
CEO & Founder, Sphere

Kinda funny to be mentioned in the same space as Buzz Tracker, not at all what Sphere does nor is it a space that needs another player.

Sphere was never discussed an acquisition with Yahoo! News for buzz tracking, plain and simple. So reports to the contrary remind us that the Valley rumor mill lives on strong as ever :).

We're happy for Yahoo! and Buzz Tracker as this a good outcome for the founders and a smart move by Scott Moore and his team at Yahoo!

You can see our post here: http://sphere.wordpress.com/2007/09/14/buzz-tra...

Hi John - great post. Here are my three favorite right now:

*Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days by Jessica Livingston

*The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

*Microserfs by Douglas Coupland

Hard to stop but these are John's participation rules! :)

Hey John - it's great having Duct Tape Marketing as a partner and your kind words are very much appreciated.

We're big fans of DTM!!

Hi George - thx for including the Related Content plug-in on your site. Best,

Tony

I met Kareem @ ESPN and then again during his days at FIM. Truly an excellent guy and it's great to see him jump into entrepreneurship. We spoke at length a month ago over coffee at my house. I think he'll do well because he's not making this change for financial gain, instead, he's trying to solve an interesting problem in a space that's aligned with his interests. Matt Mullenweg (Automattic), Ethan Diamond + Iain Lamb (Oddpost) and Toni Schneider (Automattic + Sphere + Oddpost) are other guys that focused on an interesting problem more so than the get rich quick incentives driving so many start-ups. Guys like Kareem are going to join big companies and leave and possibly join another big company in the future - it's in their DNA to do so. For them, it's about the challenge so I'm not sure that it's a knock on BIG COMPANIES, it's more about trusting your instincts. I think the key for BIG COMPANIES is to stay connected to these talented guys after they leave. CNET has done an excellent job cultivating a deeper relationship with Matt after he left CNET to start Automattic. There are lot's of other examples of companies cultivating very effective alumni networks, companies like McKinsey and Proctor & Gamble.

thanks for pointing to this - very cool and engaging. i'd like to do a tutorial for our site using this approach.

Ajay - we had a chance to catch up with Matthew following his original post. He had some really good insights that have driven some changes we've made/ are making to our service.

A few weeks ago, we asked Matthew to try out our sphere it plug-in. He agreed to do so and it is working well with his content. It's not perfect but it gets better every week as we make adjustments.

Regarding your question about paying bloggers to deploy our plug-in, we have NEVER paid anyone to deploy the plug-in. It's a service. It connects readers to more content. It drives page-views for ou partner sites. And, when deployed on major publisher sites like TIME, ZDNet, Market Watch and a bunch more going live in next few weeks, it's an opportunity to connect a larger audience to blog content. Our icon is already deployed live on 2 billion mobthly article pages. That number will double by end of March. That's a big opportunity to connect mainstream internet users with blog content.

If you have specific thought on hopw to make our service or the plug-in better, please email me (conrad@sphere.com) or call me at 650-319-2151. I've got thick skin so feel free to be direct.

LOTFL

Mark C - No, you're right, I don't think mainstream web users are going to copy and paste a URL. I also don't think they're going to go to a blog search engine to search for blogs, at least not yet. I do believe a large number of web users will discover high quality blog posts by using tools like sphere it (which is essentially a URL search). Look at TIME.com or ZDNet as examples of how well this tool works on a URL search. More and more publishers are looking for ways to engage with the blogosphere and many of them, with broad reach to mainstream web users, are adopting sphere it. Link based strategies like Technorati don't work: too prone to spam, shallow result sets and latency. We believe URL search is an effective way to surface blog posts that are contextually relevant to the article they're reading. Connecting readers to the larger conversation happening around topics is an interesting problem to solve and that's what we're focused on doing.

Cheers,
Tony

hey robert - but you still have the totals wrong - at 12:56, Sphere had 17 results.

Hey Robert - Sphere results look great. Most complete and high quality blog posts surfaced to the top - :)

Best,

Now Scott - that's a pointed comment :)

The Sphere It! bookmarklet is a very robust piece of technology, developed over several years by my two cofounders, Martin Remy and Steve Nieker.

Sphere It takes advantage of a novel text analysis technology that
analyzes entire document texts (a news article or blog post in Sphere
terms, but any text will do; the technology works just as well on
product descriptions, Word documents, etc.). Each text gets passed
through a proprietary pipeline that extracts key concepts and themes.
These key concepts and themes are encoded in a data structure we call
a Document Genome.

As the name is meant to suggest, a Document Genome is unique to the
text from which it was derived. It's worth emphasizing at this point
that DGs are not simply keyword extractions. There's a complex
analysis pipeline employing a number of both traditional and novel
text-analysis routines to identify the concepts and themes. The
tokens of the resulting Document Genome, in contrast to keywords, are
machine readable abstractions that don't mean much to the human eye.

Like the biological data sets they're named after, Document Genomes
can be compared for similarity. (I'm 98% chimp; 63% iguana!) We
generate Document Genomes for every blog post we crawl. When you're
looking at a page on the Web and click the Sphere It bookmarklet,
Sphere grabs the text of the page you're viewing, generates a
Document Genome for it on the fly, and compares it to the DGs of the
blog posts we've crawled. The closest matching blog posts are presented.

In practice, the Sphere It approach to contextual matching is
fundamentally different from other approaches out there. If you
compare it to other text-based approaches, like Google's Similar
Pages or Yahoo's Search Related Info, we're consistently much more
precise in our matches.

Compared to other blog-space approaches, like Technorati This, Sphere
It! gives a wider breadth of results on the topic. Technorati This!
limits results to only those blog posts that link directly to the
page you're viewing. How do you find the posts that were published
prior to the page you're reading, but on the same subject? How do you
find posts discussing similar topics from other sources (you're
reading WSJ, they're reading NYT)? How do you find posts discussing
the topic but not linking anywhere? Sphere It makes those
connections. (I've covered this in more detail at http://
sphere.wordpress.com/2006/05/12/week-one-in-the-rearview-mirror/)

Thanks Sid for the kind remarks and input. We've got several new features plus RSS ready for to launch in our public rollout. We'll pre-launch the new features to our beta users, who've been very helpful and encouraging, prior to our public launch. Some really great stuff! Best,

Tony Conrad
CEO/ Founder Sphere

Thanks for taking a look at our beta, Robert. I agree that we're already able to deliver better searches than other blog search engines, and I also agree that we've still got some way to go toward an ideal blog search service. We appreciate your input. We're continually improving our algorithm and we'll be rolling out index updates and adding features to the beta over the coming weeks and months.