Sphere's Blog Widget
Sphere, the blog engine that focuses on text analysis to determine post similarity, (Radar post) has launched a new JavaScript widget for blogs. When clicked, the widget displays a float with contextually similar blogs and blog posts for the reader.
As you can see, there are four quadrants in the float.
Top-Left Corner: Recent, similar blog posts from other blogs.
Bottom-Left Corner: Recommended blogs that are selected by the site-owner. This is very handy for blog networks.
Top-Right Corner: Similar posts from that blog
Bottom-Right Corner: Ad, currently served by FM Pub.
The widget adds value to the reader and the siteowner. If the reader is interested, they can find more content. For the site-owner, the reader stays on the page (the same reason I like the Live Search Box - Radar post), but there is currently no rev-share on the ad. It will be interesting to see how this affects adoption; I don't think that it will. It is definitely aimed at Typepad and Wordpress bloggers of the world and not the MySpacers - third-parties (such as Sphere) cannot monetize on MySpace.
We've added it to Radar as an experiment. Let us know if you find it useful. If you want one, go to Sphere and sign-up.
tags: web 2.0
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Comments: 2
Hi, Brady. Interesting post. The Sphere widget looks like a good tool to discover other interesting weblogs and weblog posts.
I'm not sure if you know this, but Findory has a widget that shows related articles on other weblogs as well. For example, here is the widget for O'Reilly Radar:
http://findory.com/inline/source?source=O'Reilly%20Radar&ib=1
Unlike Sphere's widget, it has no advertising in it and can be customized to the weblog's look and feel.
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phil black [11.07.06 10:01 PM]
i have been an investor in Sphere since its inception so I'm biased, but I can remember the first time that the team showed the Sphere It! capability. It started out on Time.com and has morphed into this contextual widget.
I love this thing. This widget doesn't require a registration like so many other widgets and it keeps me centered on articles and blogs about a topic that I've obviously been interested in. I look forward to more sites adopting the Sphere Widget.