Your Sphere of Influence in the Blogosphere

Posted by Svetlana Gladkova on February 5th, 2007

I am totally sure that you know Sphere is an excellent blog search and discovery engine: it only provides relevant results that can be further sorted by date and by relevance. Their featured blogs tool enables you to discover new good blogs easily.

But the reason for me writing this post is that we are happy to finally have the Spere It contextual widget for Profy - you can start using it right away to engage in a larger blogosphere conversation related to articles you read on Profy.

You must already know that Sphere It widget is now available on the most successful blogs, including ZDNet, TechCrunch and GigaOM. Do you think no other blogger of those 60 millions existing today wants to have the widget? Wrong, of course. It looks like everyone wants - but very few finally get one. That's why I'm writing this post - for you to get to know how easy and at the same time difficult it is to enhance your readers' experience with Sphere It widget.

Sure, you know how to install various widgets for your blog: you download them, add some code to your template - and you are done in a mater of minutes. So you think it should work this way everywhere. But there's a huge BUT to be mentioned here: the widget is not downloadable - it is received from Sphere team after they customize the widget for you. That makes the widget much more hard to get - but more compelling at that.

But to tell you the truth I simply was not aware Sphere It is actually quite a unique and exclusive widget. Besides, I am a strong believer that audacity pays. So I simply sent an email to Sphere CEO Tony Conrad asking him how long we were supposed to wait for the widget for Profy after our first application a month before. I am totally sure my letter (with all the boldness behind it) made Tony laugh - and that was the first reason, I think, for his reply and even considering Profy as a candidate blog for getting the widget.

So how is it actually implemented? Well, first of all, I was asked to choose three blogs “worth reading” for the bottom left quadrant of the Sphere results screen. I have chosen VentureBeat, eHub, and Scobleizer - and I am totally sure some of you read them daily as I do. After this first step it takes some hours of their work on customizing the widget for our blog. Then we simply included some code to our template, tested the widget with various browsers (here is where Sphere team shows the support and cooperation they are capable of - both factors excellent) and the widget is ready for you to use. So after you persuade Sphere team into providing your blog with the widget - it really is simple.

Sure, you might not understand what all the fuss is for. Let me tell you: it gives your post the most important thing - the context. We are blogosphere exactly because every single topic is covered by multiple bloggers - usually from different points of view. And when a person reads something interesting he frequently wants more information on the subject - and here is what Sphere is intended for. A reader clicks on the Sphere It link under a post to get a list of relevant posts from other bloggers.

Summary? Sphere It contextual widget is an incredibly good way to show your readers that you really care about providing them with a broad picture of an event. I would call it one of the most reader-friendly widgets at that. And definitely the widget that brings them more value. I am totally sure that after clicking on the Spere It link below you will see for yourself what reader-friendly stands for.

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