I heard from Sphere.com that they working with Time and other publishers to get blogs in front of more people. They feel that this is great way for people to discover blogs as well as introduce a broader, more mainstream audience to blog content. I would agree. Especially since they included my blog post on as a related blog to the Time story on "The Storm Lingers On: Katrina's Psychological Toll." If you scroll down the story you will see related blogs and the powered by Sphere logo. If you click on this you will go to a Sphere page where they list the related blogs. My post reviewing Spike Lee’s HBO documentary, When the Levees Broke is included. Clicking on the title brings you to the post on my blog. They also give a profile using information they picked up themselves with some data on my blog like number of posts last week, links last week, etc. You can click further on see more on Portals and KM at the bottom to see my most recent posts through a Sphere aggregator.
I also went to their site and there was a search bar inviting you to find out what is happening in your sphere. I typed in “knowledge management” and found that my most recent blog post on Enterprise 2.0 and Knowledge Jolt with Jack (Vinson) were among the returned items. It highlighted the matching words so I guess if I did not use knowledge management in a post I might not have showed up but I did in this one.
This is a different syndication strategy from Blog Burst which reviews and accepts you then offers your content to online newspapers and other publications. I am syndicated there but have not heard about the results yet. The Sphere people did not ask me for permission in advance to do this but they did make me aware of it after the fact. I have no problem with this as I put my content out on the web for anyone to see. I am pleased that they picked up on my content and linked it to Time, the more readers the better. I will see is there if any difference in traffic.
The Sphere site presents itself as a high quality blog search engine. The results seemed fine and I like the inclusion of related blogs to media stories. They have a Sphere blog so you follow what is happening with them.
Comments