Sphere Update

Sphere, the blog search engine, has updated its home page around the launch of SphereIt for blogs. SphereIt is a technology that they've had for a while, but thus far was only deployed on non blog media sites. SphereIt provides blog posts related to the article in question (either a news article on a media site or, now, a blog post). The feature is being delivered as a widget which can be integrated into your posts. Here's the description from the site:

Install the Sphere contextual widget and drive more page views on your blog

I'm not sure if it is intentional, but it is not clear from this if more traffic will come to your site, or if more traffic will be driven from your site to other blogs. Seems like it has to be the latter, but this text seems to be vague on that point.

Update: On closer inspection, it looks like there are more changes to the site. For example, as far as I can tell, the profiles that Sphere used to provide for individual blogs have been removed.

Comments

[tony conrad]

Hi - the primary goal of the widget is to create an enhanced user experience and to drive more page views for the authors site. We do this by showing articles from the authors site in addition to pointing our related blog posts from the blogosphere.

Profiles will be back, just making them better, more accurate :)

You can see the contextual widget in action at Market Watch and on a number of blogs such as GigaOM, Techcrunch, Techdiret, Venture Beat, Infectious Greed, all ZDNet blogs, all Market Watch blogs, Scobleizer, etc.