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Last night Sphere co-hosted a cocktail party with The New York Times, Automattic (WordPress), Giga Omni Media (GigaOM), Hearst Corporation and True Ventures. Matt has some great photos up at his blog. We celebrated the evolution afoot in the media industry, bringing together large publishers, micro-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.

People often ask us how Sphere’s products and technology fare versus our competition. While we believe that the results (namely our footprint) speak for themselves, it’s worth discussing some of the key differentiators between Sphere and other similar services out there:

If you’re a site owner or publisher and any of this gets you excited, send us an email by clicking the “contact us” link at the top right of our site.

Today is our co-founder and CEO, Tony Conrad’s, birthday. Tony is 38 today. Several famous athletes have been born on March 3 – Rick Mirer, Ben Roethlisberger, Herschel Walker, Jackie Joyner-Kersee; a few musicians – Dave Amato of REO Speedwagon and Jeff’s favorite, Tone Loc; plus at least one braniac, Alexander Graham Bell. Not surprising company considering Tony was a college athlete, all-around groover, and well….our CEO. Happy Birthday Tony!!

  Josh on the best value proposition in widget-ology.

Mark Glaser has an interesting post on the narrowing gap between bloggers and traditional journalists. As Mark points out, the distinction is less relevant more than ever. Traditional journalists blog, they write shorter articles, they post more frequently and they invite comments – all things the bloggers first demonstrated had appeal. Big blogs have Editors, Sales professionals and operate more like savvy publishers everyday.

I don’t even think of the big blog sites as blogs, they’re more like micro-publishers. They’re businesses. They worry about page-views, their brands and they sell sponsorships/ advertising on their sites at very high CPM’s. From our vantage point, this all makes sense. Why should the media industry evolve any differently than other industries where we’ve seen this phenomenon before (Music, Consumer Package Goods, Grocery Stores just to name a few)? In our widgets, we’ve already started adding some “micro-publishers” into our Related Media quadrant, thus moving them out of the Related Blogs quadrant. We’re not sure that’s the right approach but we feel like it gives some “traditional” blogs a better opportunity for exposure while not penalizing traditional media sites nor the larger blogs.

How do you think about this?

I want to share a few thoughts on why advertising in tandem with Sphere’s Related Content modules (CONTEXTUAL IN-LINE & Widget) is gaining traction with Top Tier advertisers. In the past quarter, we’ve run campaigns with Dell, Verizon, Barack Obama and Symantec. The latter, currently is running it’s second campaign with us – just scroll to the bottom of this Salon article to see a live example.

As we all know now, Google Ads are so valuable in part because users have expressed an interest in the product/ service by their action of searching for that product/ service or something related. Sphere, on the other hand, has built a killer “implicit search” engine. A user who clicks on one of our links, or even looks at the module for a few seconds, has implicitly searched for that content. They have taken an action and that is why advertising to them can be so valuable. We believe this is potentially much more valuable and efficient then contextual ads that are on the side or bottom of the page — where they don’t know that the user is very engaged in that topic. In our initial campaigns, we’re seeing very high engagement/ advertising effectiveness. We believe this is partly because the reader is engaged with the content.

Sphere is now on a lot of article pages each month. Within our growing network of partner sites, readers can navigate web content in a new way. The user can just point and click instead of constructing a keyword search. Very few search tools deal with multiple-word queries – instead the user types one or two words in a search box. Unless you construct the words perfectly, your search engine will not be able to discern the valuable words and therefore, it will unlikely point you to more content that is contextually relevant to what you’re reading. Thus, Sphere is adding a unique capability and core functionality.

Sphere’s approach is different. Our core technology is a utilizes Sphere’s proprietary Content Genome.™ The Content Genome™ was developed specifically to deliver high precision, low cost (automated) related content delivery in dynamic on-line publishing and news environments. Unlike other solutions, the Content Genome™ does not require a taxonomy or training — Sphere can index any text artifacts, or media with associated text, and generate related content out of the box. In other words, we use the words that people read in an article to get a sense of what the article is talking about and then we match it with other content that is contextually relevant.

When we started Sphere, we thought about our ad opportunity as akin to Google’s AdSense (e.g. Contextual ads on publisher pages). But what we’re saying above, because Sphere is an Implicit Search Engine, is that maybe it’s more like AdWords — e.g. Sponsored links on the Google search page.

We’ll share some more thoughts on advertising soon. In the interim, we’d love to hear your thoughts.

I’m excited to update you with Sphere’s most recent launch on a major news site. We recently added Newsweek as a partner, joining a list that includes some of the best news sites on the web: The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, CNN, US News & World Report, TIME, AOL News/Sports/Entertainment, CBS, Forbes, MLB, ZDNet, Washington Post, TMZ and several more MSM sites and over 50,000 blogs. Newsweek 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. We’re very proud of the quality and relevance of our results on Newsweek, here’s what we launched :

• • *Related articles from the Newsweek archives;
    
  • *Related blog posts from the Blogosphere; and
    
  • *Recommended Blogs

Sphere related content is on every article in every section of the Newsweek site. Here’s the most recent lead article from the home page as an example – CLICK HERE. When the page opens, just click on the Sphere icon link in the Article Tools box. This means that every article page on Newsweek displays both related articles from Newsweek and high quality bloggers, resulting in more opportunities for bloggers to add their voice to the discussion – a great opportunity for bloggers to join the conversation as well as reach a broader audience of readers. Always a good thing. Thanks to Newsweek for embracing the blogosphere and for their unwavering support in partnering with us. A special thanks to Kevin Stuart for his support and for nailing this implementation.

We get notes from bloggers every day about links they discover from major media Sphere partner sites like WSJ, TIME, AOL, REUTERS, CBS, etc. This afternoon I got an email from one of our blog partner sites that shared performance data on Sphere Related Content Widget vs other icon links they use on their site. The data is really exciting on this end: Sphere generated 1,161 clicks on their site in January, more than double that of the other 8 icon links (1,161 vs 544) on their site. A great way to end the week – Here is the original email:

*Hat tip to Wanky Comics for the Link Love graphic