SEO News Blog

Sphere’s CEO Tony Conrad aggreed to take my questions on the company and on where it’s heading. If you don’t know what Sphere is check out Sphere’s about page and Sphere’s blog. They describe it as an advanced search algorithm helps you discover high-quality, relevant, and timely blog posts and makes it possible for publishers to integrate contextually relevant blog posts alongside their articles. Since I received my copy of the Sphere It Wordpress Plugin I’ve realized how quick and easy Sphere is and how much it helps out my users.

My goal with this interview is to delve deeper into what started and runs this great company. As well as what you might expect from Sphere in the future.

Didier: Tony Conrad thank you for participating. I think you have a lot to share. Let’s start with background what brought you to the Blogging field?

Tony: Prior to starting Sphere, I was an investor and board member at Oddpost, a web-mail application that was acquired by Yahoo! in July. 2004. At Oddpost, we saw first-hand the reach and influencer bloggers had on driving awareness and trial of Oddpost. It was really impressive. As a result, we began white-boarding a lot of ideas about RSS, blog search and discovery. As luck would have it, Yahoo! pre-empted our ability to build out any of those ideas. So beginning of 2005, Toni Schneider (former CEO Oddpost), Steve Nieker, Martin Remy and I started kicking the tires again and felt there was still a good opportunity to solve a hard problem in the blog search and discovery space: help readers more easily discover great blog content. So we formed Sphere to solve that simple, yet hard problem.

Didier: How is that you became CEO of Sphere and what qualified you for this job? Any special strengths, traits, or connections that made you the ideal candidate to lead Sphere?

Tony: I’ve been lucky to be an investor or board member in a number of great start-ups like Automattic (WordPress), Post Communications (NASDAQ: NTVS) and Stonyfield Farms (acquired by Groupe Danone), Iconoculture, MusicNow (acquired by Circuit City). Oddpost was the most interesting and fun given how in front of the curve we were on Web 2.0. Working with Ethan Diamond and Ian Lamb along with Toni, I got the entrepreneurial bug and felt the urge to build a start-up that solved a hard problem.
As a team, we were the ideal group of technical and business talents to chase this opportunity. We were able to hit the ground running because Martin and Steve had been working on blog and content matching technology for a long time. These guys are very high quality technologists. Toni and I had deep relationships in the valley and we had a prooven track record of being successful. As a result, we we were able to quickly bring together an A-list group of investors (Doug Mackenzie, David Mahoney, Kevin Compton, Mike Winton, Scott Kurnit, Phil Black, Vince Vannelli, Will Hearst, True Ventures, Trident Capital, Hearst Interactive) and advisors including (Matt Mullenweg, Founder of Automattic/ WordPress, a blog content tool leader; Josh Macht, former Editor of Time.com and now Managing Director of new publishing ventures at Harvard Business School Publishing; Ron McCoy, former Chief Technology Officer of New York Times Digital and About.com; Mary Hodder, Founder/CEO of Dabble and a blog user experience expert; and Scott Kurnit, Founder and former CEO of About.com who did some amazing work creating community there.)

Didier: Over the past year or so, Sphere your company, has grown to enormous popularity in the blogosphere. To what do you attribute that increase? What strategy did you use to gain such popularity? And was all this attributed to organic growth or was there strategic planning involved?

Tony: In the beginning, we focused on solving a hard problem and created a good product. We kept it simple. We focused on user experience. Once we went live, we allowed ourselves ample time to make adjustments before elevating our exposure. In November, we took it to another level by expanding our focus with the launch of our very popular Sphere It Contextual Widget. With this widget, we’ve figured out the intersection of mainstream and social media, connecting readers to the larger conversation happening around content. Our launch strategy was to create a killer product that created value for both the reader and the publisher. We focused on launching with A-list partners including Dow Jones Market Watch, ZDNet and the top 50 Tech blogs including TechCrunch, O’Reilly Radar, Techdirt, Battelle Searchblog, Venture Beat and GigaOm. By doing so, we created instant awareness and credibility. We also made sure we created value for each of those partners and, most importantly, their readers. Simple concepts but all very hard to do.

Didier: The blogosphere is a growing filed that seems to have no end to it, how do you plan on taking advantage of this? What are some of the things that you like about the blogosphere?

Tony: I think the blogosphere will continue to grow exponentially for the next few years. I’m on the board of Automattic (WordPress) and we see increasing interest in people wanting to try blogging as well as bloggers becoming micro-publishers. It’s exciting to see what is happening, more and more people launching blogs. Many of those blogs have become very sophisticated. Many of those bloggers have marketed themselves very intelligently, creating a foundation of loyal readers. I love blogs because they’re informal, passionate, insightful, inter-active, human and they take positions which stimulates dialog and understanding.

Didier: What do you feel will set your company apart from the many tools available to bloggers these days?

Tony: Utility. Adding to the user experience vs. benefiting from it.
At Web 2.0 and Om Malik’s and Niall Kennedy’s Widgets Live Conference, there was a lot of discussion and strategizing around widgets. Many of these widgets are activated when web readers click on the little icons they find at the bottom of article pages - a space we’ve started calling Iconistan. As an example, you’ll notice several icons at the bottom of each article: Digg, Stumble Upon, De.lic.ious, RSS and more — what’s interesting is the increasing number of places these icons are showing up and how little they do (most ask the reader to sign in, fill out forms, etc.) and, if anything at all, to add to the reader experience. Most often, readers don’t even understand what these funny little words mean. Yet, they show up - you already find them on mainstream sites, and in 2007, you’ll find them increasingly everywhere. The battle for inclusion next to articles/ blog posts is already heating up. To win inclusion, we believe you have to do two things: enhance the reader experience and drive additional page-views that can be monetized.

In contrast, the Sphere It widget connects the reader to contextually relevant articles, blog posts and blogs. The ability to join the conversation is seamlessly integrated with Sphere never losing a reader to the dreaded sign in box or a constant labyrinth of links…We developed the Sphere It Contextual Widget to achieve the above user experience and business model goals better than anyone. Sphere drives additional page-views (when readers click on the Sphere It! icon, that counts as a page-view; secondly, Sphere offers links to related posts from the journalist/ bloggers content repository, resulting in additional page-views for their site as well as enhanced navigation). Most importantly, Sphere adds to the reader experience, enabling readers to connect to additional content that adds to the discussion.

Didier: The Sphere It WordPress plug-in is a great tool that is still in development, how do you think this tool will affect the blogosphere when it finally comes out? What are some of the ways you plan on getting ahead of all the other social media tools out there? And when can we expect it to come out?

Tony: We’ve started by writing a Sphere It WordPress plug-in for our widget - you’re one of our first deployments :). We’re also integrating it into WordPress.com so it will soon be available to all WordPress users. We have a few more ideas but, as always with our team, let’s focus on making those two products great and then we can earn the right to expand our offering into other content types like video and audio. I believe our contextual widget is a very important tool that will connect mainstream media users to the blogosphere. Sphere It can already be found on a number of leading mainstream publisher sites, TIME and AOL the two most recent additions. By end of March, the Sphere It widget will be seen on most of the top news sites that create over 3 billion monthly article page-views. That’s tremendous exposure for bloggers. And I get psyched about how that can broaden the user-base for blogs.

Didier: When Sphere first came out you received a lot of feedback from the blogosphere, what recommendations from users were implemented in Sphere? Can you think of anything in particular that stands out that a user suggested and was eventually implemented?

Tony: Users really helped make it clear that we needed to focus on our Sphere It application. We made available a bookmarklet at launch. Users loved that tool and we got a lot of requests for making the tool available in articles. We also got tremendous insight from TIME.com who was our first publisher partner. We integrated our bookmarklet into their articles but the thing that bugged me, as a user, was that when I clicked on the Sphere It icon it sent me to the Sphere site. Great for our page-views but an annoying user experience. It was that learning along with user requests that drove us to develop the Sphere It contextual widget. Without TIME.com and user input, we would have gone in a different direction.

Thank you Tony your time is greatly appreciated!