New Sphere Focuses On Connections Between News Stories
Michael Arrington
27 comments »
When blog search engine Sphere launched in May 2006, it included a unique feature that discovered, on the fly, stories related to what you were reading regardless of whether or not the two stories were hyperlinked.
The feature, called “Sphere It,” has grown in popularity and has helped Sphere get itself embedded in top blogs and news sites. We include a Sphere It link at the bottom of each post, which pulls up a window where other blog stories that talk about related issues are shown. Time.com and other major news sites have done the same. Today, a substantial portion of Sphere’s total traffic comes from these partner sites using the feature to generate more content (and page views) for readers.
Tonight Sphere relaunched their home page to reflect the usefulness of this feature. The main area of the site is broken down into four columns. On the left are major topics, like Top News, U.S. News, Entertainment, Sports, Technology, etc. Click on any topic and the second column populates with recent news items from Sphere partners (sites like ours, Time.com and others that include the Sphere It functionality) that has generated a lot of buzz, which is calculated based on page views for the item (against an average for the site) and other factors the company isn’t disclosing (but which probably include an anlysis of the extent to which other sites are writing about similar things).
Click on any news item and it is pulled up in column three. In column four, related news items are shown.
You can keep clicking on a topic infinitely. Click on a column four story - it moves left, and column four shows news items related to that story.
Like TechMeme, the new Sphere site can become a place that people check frequently to see what news is breaking in the blogosphere and mainstream media, and see other content about that topic. It’s different than TechMeme in that Sphere doesn’t require links between articles.
News sites that want to be included in Sphere It must add the feature to their sites. The Sphere home page has a link to do that.
Sphere has raised just $4 million to date from True Ventures, Trident Capital and a number of angel investors. The company has eight employees.
I haven’t spent a lot of time at Sphere but I wanted to check it out and search for HD-DVD and there wasn’t a peep about what’s happening at sites like Digg. Man, are you guys seeing what’s happening there? Talk about Revolution 2.0, it’s ugly.
Connections between News Stories is probably the next big thing.
It might replace TechMeme for frequent tech news surfers.
‘News sites that want to be included in Sphere It must add the feature to their sites. The Sphere home page has a link to do that.’
I wonder how they will maintain quality of content though.
Might have less signal and more noise in the short run.
Hey Mike - thanks for your review of Sphere. You can see some additional thoughts on our blog at http://sphere.wordpress.com/20.....s-sphered/
I think they are implementing a smart go-to-market strategy with an affiliate model for news publishers. It would be crucial to get major ones signed.
yeh most deffinetly
Here’s another concept: editor picked tech news @ http://www.wiredb.com
Too many news are automatically harvested and has nothing human …
I have to say i like the idea as a concept- but i find the limited display of information on the homepage a big negative. I regularly use Techmeme as it gives me a lot of grouped content all at once - it’s my choice how fast or how slow i scan the headlines.
The new Sphere interface is nice - but that’s really not why i go there…
Thanks Matthew, I really appreciate. You see, for much more news I’m using a feed reader, which gives me a lot of new stuff published. We tried to keep at a minimum, but still usable, for people who don’t have the time to read tens or hundreds of sources, or virtually thousands news a day.
I have been using Israeli based http://strategicboard.com to see what’s hot in the blogs.
Sounds like a neat concept - i have somthing in the pipes that could - hopefully be featured on TC .. in a couple months (news / related) .. and of course nothing like digg
Cool service! However once “Related Blogs and Articles” popup appears, there is no way to get Related Content form stories listed there, you have to click on the story and get immediately sent offsite. There should be greater ability to drill down.
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We are putting Sphere on our site…it’s the future. We’ve also had some nice traffic from Time.com via the Sphere partnership. Think they should aggressively expand their network to BBC etc etc.
Sorry not for me…
Hi Joe - thanks for the input. The idea behind the site is to let users infinitely drill down. When you click on an article in the Breaking News Column (Column 2), it gets previewed in the center preview window (Column 3). We then generate related content for the previewed article in the Related Content Column (Column 4). If you click on one of those articles, it will move to the preview window and we find more related content. The cycle, in theory, never ends.
Aren’t there lots of others already doing this “personal homepage”? I don’t get it.
Great new design. A big step forward!! I also like the idea of dynamic updating with top stories from distribution partners….a cool way to grab a snapshot of the blogosphere and publishersphere in real time. Might be a good idea to apply some weighted algorithm (if you’re not already) since a blog posting that received 40,000 PVs, might be more popular on a relative basis than a NY Times story that received 60,000.
Hey Josh - really appreciate your kind words. The weighting algorithm actually does try to make it a level playing field for blogs and the big page-view publisher sites. We’re tweaking and hopefully we’ll end up in the right place.
Mike - can you provide some details on the traffic you receive from Sphere?
Allen - Yeah, we’ll pull that up and publish it at some point. Good idea.
Last I checked the Sphere website they were only allowing limited sites to utilize it. Has that changed?
Hi David - the site is open at http://www.sphere.com
also, our Sphere Related Content widget is available for WordPress.org, TypePad, Moveable Type and Blogger
What motivates a blogger putting Sphere it in his blog? When a reader clicks on Sphere it, it shows stuff from other sites and sends the reader away to other sites.
I thought a bloggers would want to keep readers on his own site longer. Am I missing something?
Hi Larry - bloggers also want to add to the user experience which is what we’re focused on doing. Partner sites also benefit from being linked to from other widget sites, increasing page-views and exposing new readers to their content. The argument against trapping users on a site is widely adopted. Sites like Yahoo and Google News were pioneers in linking out and both dwarf some of the venerable publisher brands that maintained a walled garden approach for a number of years. Most of those same sites proactively link outside their sites today b/c their users have embraced that approach. I believe, and I think most bloggers agree, that linking out is a part of the desired user experience.