DISQUS

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.

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.

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