Sphere Update

Sphere will soon be providing RSS feeds for their blog search. This is a must have feature, of course, but I'm starting to get the feature that Sphere is going down quite a different path from that which I originally imagined. Mary Hodder, one of the reasons I suspected Sphere was going to deliver something disruptive, has voiced some very interesting points:

I believe that blog search, at this point, is a baseline for any company in the space. You have to do it. But it's not so interesting to me, compared to making a leap forward toward something like topic browsing of communities or sophisticated weighting of bloggers. I'm less interested in 'yet another blog search' tool. The ones we had already were fine. But I've very interested in what Sphere is really here for: changing the ways we can view small topic communities and the bloggers within them in sophisticated ways that take us ahead of where we are now, which I equate to the place websearch was in in 1997, before Google.

I get the impression that Mary is a little disappointed with Sphere. Perhaps Mary should take TailRank for a spin...

Comments

[mary hodder]

Hi Mathew,
I'm not at all disappointed with Sphere.

I am though looking for something more interesting that takes us a leap ahead of where we are now with blogsearch. So Sphere is starting out with what any company in this space must do, but the really interesting stuff will come when they complete the topic browsing stuff. I'm looking forward to seeing that.
mary

[Matthew Hurst]

Mary,

Thanks for the update. I'd be excited to hear more - I mean, a lot more - about your topic browsing vision. I think it gets at the heart of the question: what do people use the (content of) the blogosphere for? There are thin- and thick-client technologies that support various answers to that. The thin is to allow users to browse a richer structure layered on top; the thick is to give users powerful analytical engines on their machines. Both have a role depending on who the user is and what their task is.