toni.org

We launched an interesting new feature yesterday that shows related content below blog posts on WordPress.com. It’s powered by Sphere and offers additional navigation options to blog readers and free content promotion across our network of 3 million blogs to WordPress.com bloggers. Josh from Sphere describes it well:

This is really cool for WordPress because it’s one of the first examples of a network of their size and scope leveraging the power of their community to circulate content between blogs. It’s also great for individual bloggers, because it gives them the opportunity to highlight and syndicate their content, both internally on their own sites and across the broader WordPress platform.

I got a noticeable increase of “Twitter followers” in the last few weeks. This is amusing (I have a single tweet from over a year ago on my Twitter account, not much to follow there) and it also made me wonder what’s changed. It could be due to recent improvements that make it easier to find people on their network. Or are there other new promotional features that could be the cause of this? There’s also been a corresponding bump in traffic that started a few weeks ago.

We spent spring break in Mexico - a good excuse to try out our new photo gallery feature:

Big congratulations to the Sphere team for selling their company to AOL (and to AOL for a smart acquisition). It couldn’t have happened to a nicer and more talented group of people. I’ve had the pleasure of working closely with Sphere as an adviser for several years. My main early contribution was to bring together the founding team - Tony Conrad, Steve Nieker, and Martin Remy (they generously give me co-founder credit as well). I knew Tony, Steve and Martin from my Oddpost days (Tony was a VC investor in Oddpost; Steve and Martin had an RSS/blog search and recommendation product called Waypath that we were thinking of integrating into Oddpost). Tony had left his VC job and Steve and Martin were looking for a business person to help them grow their company. So I introduced them and they hit it off. I helped out with the initial Sphere launch as much as my job allowed (I was at Yahoo at the time) and they went on to build a great team, create a series of innovative content matching services, and sign up over 60,000 sites to use their products. I’ll also note that Sphere is one of a new breed of 100% virtual companies (everyone works from their own home offices and meets up in person every few months) - good to see a virtual company build a strong business and get acquired by someone like AOL.