spherons!

One of the best signs that we’re gaining traction with our approach to finding high quality content is the amount of feedback we get everyday, lots and lots. People email us to tell us how they use the site, what works, what doesn’t and what they’d like to see added. They share with us blogs, photos and podcasts they feel should be featured. Sometimes it’s just to say “kudos” – :). Today we got a new nickname (Spherons) along with some very nice comments from the good folks at Ookles (started by well respected entrepreneur Scott Johnson). Scott founded Feedster and really knows the space.

 

“Hi there, Spherons (if this sticks, I get the credit. Thanks.)

I’m skeptical of the Web 2.0 hype and tire quickly of the “vie en rose” attitude expressed in company blogs and, individually, the very pretend altruistic righteousness of the Valley Crowd (it’s still about getting R I C H). They’re losers. But I like Sphere, which I was skeptical of at first. I find myself using it a lot. Technorati is a bloody mess. Unreadable. Headache to look at. Google blog search is okay, but I find they are not so great with ranking results — especially by date/time and by relevance. I think whoever else does this sucks, because I don’t really use anything else and don’t care to. Blogs are the best way to mine for opinion. Anyways, regarding Sphere. Sphere has a clean and simple interface. Somehow Sphere returns timely and relevant results — from even the most obscure blogs. I’ve tested! So good work. It’s annoying that the default search time range is too small.”

Since launch, we’ve made tiny adjustments here and there, all driven by feedback. Hearing your thoughts is the best part of the day. And getting a new nickname is a bonus. Scott, you officially get the credit! And, we’re working on the date range, looking to make it more interactive.

chocolate, dirt, fug, dooce and 37 days in the sphere

I look at blogs all day long. Just about every day. Okay. Every day. And while I’ve found a few I drop in on from time to time, like chocolateandzucchini for some relaxing gourmet food indulgences or dirtbyamystewart for common sense garden talk. (I love the way she laughs at people who want no maintenance gardens!) And, I must admit the guilty pleasure of fashion faux pas fun at gofugyourself. But today I found one of those rare gems — a blog I could look forward to reading every day. And, I’m kind of embarrassed to admit it, because it seems everyone knew about dooce before me. Heck, her blogging has been paying her bills for some time now. Pretty cool gig, if you ask me, which is one of the many things that excites me about Sphere. Having seen first hand at About.com how popular guides could quit their day jobs to focus full time on their web sites, I look to Sphere to make similar successes happen for bloggers. By organizing, highlighting and featuring great bloggers Sphere is improving the reader experience while at the same time helping to showcase witty, thoughtful, provocative and insightful bloggers. Speaking of which, let me turn you onto one you may not have seen, that I found through Sphere. It’s called 37 days. If you read the “why 37 days page” you’ll understand how it came to be.

today’s cool thing…..

……making it’s way through the blogosphere – click your mouse to change color.

small signs of blogs reaching the mainstream

Hot Searches is one of my favorite sections on our homepage. It gives me a quick idea of what people are talking about in the blogosphere. I’ve noticed that our community searches on a broader range of topics than the technology/ political and current event posts that we normally see featured in the blogosphere. Today’s hot searches include Ben Roethlisberger (bad motorcycle accident for the Steelers QB), Mariah Carey (she lost a bomb of weight), The U.S. Open and of course the World Cup (GOOOOAAAAAAAAL). Another search that just moved into the top ten for the day is people looking for posts talking about the Garrison Keillor article he wrote for Tribune Media Services. I found this development particularly interesting because it serves as an example of how the blog reader can be (and is in this case) very different from the blog writer. Only a handful of bloggers (4 at the time of this post) have blogged about the article yet it’s surfaced as one of our top searched on terms.

I’m excited to see both trends, more mainstream topic searches and readership interest driving the discussion. It’s not only nice to see other blog topics gaining readership, it’s critical if the blogosphere is going to cross into the mainstream content habit. We’d love to hear your thoughts on what you think will help the blogosphere become more mainstream.

Sphere and Cymfony partner to enable marketers to understand bloggers impact on their brands

With so many people reading, writing, and commenting on blogs, leading brands realize they need to better understand how the most influential voices in the blogosphere are impacting the opinions of their customers. Identifying those voices on a timely basis is difficult.

Sphere and Cymfony, the leading innovator in combining traditional and social media research and analysis, are announcing a partnership that will expand Cymfony’s service offerings. By being the first to draw on Sphere’s advanced blog search and relevance technology, Cymfony will provide its clients more data and better analysis to gain a deeper understanding of how the messages in social media can change and amplify messages delivered via traditional media. As a result, Cymfony clients can more accurately measure the effectiveness of their communications, identify ideas for new products, isolate issues around service quality and discover emerging trends.

Cymfony will first integrate Sphere’s data about blog link structures, quality, as well as who is linking to whom, and perform analysis of the relative influence of blog posters within an existing conversation. Second, Cymfony will use Sphere’s technology to analyze meta data and establish baselines, including posting frequency, lengths of postings, and other data. Third, Sphere’s advanced spam elimination algorithms will ensure that Cymfony clients get all of the most relevant blogs without the spam. Cymfony will provide an additional layer of semantic analysis of each blog posting to help Cymfony customers identify the most influential voices in the blogosphere.

We’re thrilled to be working with Cymfony with whom we have a shared vision of how the traditional and people media worlds are evolving and converging. Stay tuned as we announce several other partnerships in the coming weeks.

700 vs 70,000 – hey, where did all our zer0’s go?

As the world woke up to the news that Zarqawi, one of the most wanted terrorists has met his end it’s normal to find the blogger community all over it. I got an email from one of our users pointing out a huge gap in the results number for Sphere and Technorati. So I did a comparison. A search on Sphere @ 6:00 am PST yields 700 from the last day (its now up to 2,922 @ 4:20 PST) while a search on Technorati comes up with close to 72,349.

I thought about this during my flight. Can that be right? 70,000 blog posts on an event that happened a few hours ago? Seems like an awfully inflated number. So I spent some time surfing through their results. What does Zarqawi have to do with apartment rentals in Florida? Is anyone really clicking on Zarqawi collectibles from ebay? Gee, I hope not. And results from 2 days ago have nothing to do with what the reader wants in this case – that is one of the reasons we offer date ranges in our search results, it helps you narrow the time range and generally gets you results that are the most up to date with the topic you’re interested in tracking.

My point is, more is not always better. Who has the time or the patience? Especially when most of the results have nothing to do with the actual search you’re doing. The Web is about ease and convenience–it’s about saving time by having the work done for you. Sphere’s advanced algorithms filter out the noise and surface only the most relevant results based on more than just keyword matching.The number of results should grow as more people hop on the story, but when you’re looking for a needle in a haystack, a small pile on a platter with relevant matches is preferable to sift through.

what’cha into?

By all accounts the blogosphere is growing like gangbusters. Faster than that. It’s ridiculous growth. Too-much-to-keep-track-of growth. David Sifry’s Alerts says that 75,000 new blogs are created each day–that’s one started just about every second–and the number of blogs doubles about every six months.

So, how do you find good blogs? How do you find blogs that haven’t been started and then stopped two months later when the reality of the commitment sunk in? How do you find blogs that go beyond the mere reporting of the day’s activities, providing both inspiration and support, information, connection, conversation if you want it and just a quick break from the daily grind? You can search. And search will get you a good deal of the way there. But it’s still not navigation. Somebody smart (Jeremy Liew @ Lightspeed Venture Partners) told me that search was created to compensate for bad navigation. Interesting point.

If you use sphere as your blog search engine and apply a little topic logic you’ll be rewarded with timely and relevant blog search results plus a navigational bonus called Featured Blogs. Think about what moves you. Do you need your daily dose of sports team updates before you head to the office or would you rather grab a few minutes with your lunch looking at gadgets? How would you use sphere to satisfy that urge? Start at the home page and in the search box type in the name of your favorite major league baseball team or a topic most related to what you’re looking for, like cartoons. When you get to the results page, choose the button in the right hand panel called Featured Blogs. There you should find a collection of up to ten high-quality blogs sphere recommends that discuss our topic of interest. And we’ve now added the most recent blog posts from the featured blogs – sorta like a mini blog newspaper on the chosen topic.

It’s still in Beta, so we’re looking for your input. Tell us about bloggers you think need to be added. If you don’t see one we should be featuring click on the ‘suggest a blogger’ link at the top of the page and let us know. It’s not a perfect system. But, we think it’s a great way to discover new blog content.

take a chance on moi

Over at AdTech last month there was a lot of buzz about rss and blogging. Seems as though a growing number of savvy marketers and advertising agencies have gotten hip to the opportunity that user generated content offers their products, services and brands. I’ve always believed that word of mouth advocacy is the most effective way to generate brand awareness, trial and cultivate perception. Nothing like a recommendation from a fellow human being to inspire curiosity and trust. Unfortunately, some premier marketers are still playing it too close to the vest, afraid to truly “empower” consumers – that’s a term that makes me cringe, everyone talks about “consumer empowerment” but I see little evidence of that happening in a truly open environment. The trick is how do you provoke a dialogue in a positive direction. Here’s an example: last year the Music group Nine Inch Nails released their latest single, “The Hand That Feeds,” as a multi-track Garageband file for remixing by their fans. Trent Reznor, band leader Trent Reznor wrote:

“For quite some time I’ve been interested in the idea of allowing you the ability to tinker around with my tracks – to create remixes, experiment, embellish or destroy what’s there. After spending some quality time sitting in hotel rooms on a press tour, it dawned on me that the technology now exists and is already in the hands of some of you. I got to work experimenting and came up with something I think you’ll enjoy. … Change the tempo. Add new loops. Chop up the vocals. Turn me into a woman. Replay the guitar. Anything you’d like. I gave this to my crew and band to test out and all work effectively stopped for a while – it’s fun to mess around with. I’ve now heard a country version of the track as well as an abstract Latin interpretation (thanks, Leo). There are some copyright issues involved, so read the notice that pops up. Giving this away is an experiment. I’m interested to see what comes of it, what issues are raised and what the results are. Have fun-Trent Reznor”

Wow, that is bold and smart too. Lets imagine apple or nike doing the same with their ad footage, music, logo – taking those digital brand assets and floating them to consumers who can in turn remix commercials, make their own or just play around with the brand in fun and interesting ways. It’s hard to imagine because at the end of the day, consumer empowerment is a scarry proposition for brand conscious corporate America. But I think it shouldn’t be – I see this as an incredible opportunity to strengthen brand relationships with customers. It’s happening anyway – many of you saw the apple ipod commercial created by a southern california school teacher named George Masters – it’s slick, captures the ipod brand essence quite well and it’s from a fan who wants the whole world to know that he thinks the ipod is nothing short of excellent. Sure, some people may do unattractive things (ask GM), but I’ll bet a majority of people will produce content that strengthens brands. In the case of GM, they got informed and if their listening, that’s powerful insight. My take away: it’s better to be proactive than reactive and I think this window of opportunity is narrow. If you’re apple, why not run a contest for the best people media apple ad – the winning ad gets a $5 million media buy against it – image how many apple enthusiasts would participate and the impact on apple’s already fantastic brand image. Sure, while a handful of people might produce derogatory ads, the majority of participants will create imaginative content that reinforces their affinity with the brand. I believe the first brands to take a calculated risk will win big.

Posted by Tony

 

 

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