James Gross

Congrats to Tony Conrad and Sphere for landing a deal with Time Magazine. I like the idea of getting away from link cosmos and going with something like content semantic analysis. I have been a fan of Tony’s ideas since I saw him speak of his Bmodel at SXSW. Anytime you can land a distribution partner like Time when you have four employees, you are doing good business.

Susan Mernit made the following statement about Sphere’s new deal:

Very cool, but it makes me wonder why Sphere was successful in pulling this off when Technorati, Feedster, and probably every other start-up in blogosphere land has been pitching these guys (and every other big media outlet) since late 2004.

At Feedster, we did pull this off, and in fact, on a much larger scale than Time Magazine. In the end it comes down to the product and time will only tell if the mainstream is ready for a ‘Sphere It’ product. I can see this product being built out into a dashboard where an editor could have this tool on their backend, and have the ability to quickly go through and check the blogs they want around their articles. This could provide immediate ‘conversation on news’ around their story and then all links could open up to an additional, in this case Time Magazine, page that would be a whole page of results. Maybe tied into a dynamic blog community with other posts(headlines and excerpts), podcasts,etc. A huge channel of blog content that makes all parties involved(publisher, reader, blogger) happy.

Right now, as far as I can see, ‘Sphere It’ is great technology but it is not bringing Time any immediate additional page views. That is not a sustainable business model for Time, and not a good selling point for Sphere considering the last thing most old media properties want to do is have people jumping out of their walled gardens.(GoldenRule: old media has the money, they set the rules.)

Feedburner as a Meme Aggregator/Content Syndication Service

Another place a technology like ‘Sphere It’ could get interesting is with a partner like Feedburner. Feedburner will soon have 300,000 feeds in it’s index. No one has a deeper understanding of their index(publishers and their readers) and can give better on-demand analytics. So imagine if you have a content semantic tool like ‘Sphere It’, with a dynamic, spam free, and smart index like FeedBurner. And what if Feedburner allowed for people to upload their ‘blog icon’, develop an identity around their feed, ala ‘claim your blog’ on Technorati. (I think this is one issue that Dave Winer is starting to get worried about when he talks about the centralization of so many feeds, and maybe rightly so . But I don’t think we can blame Feedburner for being the brilliant technology and marketing company that put the ‘Really Simple Syndication’ in Feeds.) This new smart index could follow memes and could provide ‘conservation around news’ on demand by popularity/relevance(basing this off the number of times that the feed has been called, links, etc.), or by timeliness(who was the last person talking about X). Who needs an index of 40 million, especially if you can’t really make sense of it? Hell, turn on MySpace and some of these other “blog” hosted sites and you could have an index of 200 million blogs and you could spend all day monitoring your ping servers.(With 80% of blog comments being spam, what percentage of your typical blog index do you think is spam? How many are dead/irrelevant?) If the goal is to provide relevant/JIT syndicated conversations across a major news site there is no need to draw from the millions. Feedburner’s index will continue to grow relative to blogging and the demographics of the index will continue to look more like the overall blogger demographic. Since they provide so many good tools and so many of their users spend a lot of time on their site, setting up profiles would be ntohing more than adding a tab to the users dashboard.

Where this feature could get even more interesting is in licensing the content to third parties like BlogBurst is trying to do. Feedburner already has the smart index on publishers and the platform set up for payment to a publisher. This could just be an additional feature that a publisher could turn on if they wanted too, and Feedburner could offer the content up in a auction or license style manner to major content providers. Feedburner could become the content marketplace like Google currently is for advertising.

Blog Search is no longer Search
Anyone else notice that Technorati is looking less and less like search; and more like a blog directory/community? I think this is because JIT(Just In Time) search is dead from a Bmodel perspective. The conventional, type text into a query box and press the ‘search’ button, doesn’t really work with blogs. Do you get up in the morning and type Apple into a search box, or do you just look at the news portals to see if anything important has happened? Look at Google News, syndicated on-demand news(and blogs will come), and how about their new ‘suggest’ feature. People dont want to search for what just happened, they want it given to them. That is why Technorati seems to be transforming into, a blog directory/portal that provides multiple services and is built on top of a community.

In the end, big media thinks they get this “MySpace or CGC thing” and they have the ad demand but need the cheap additional pages of content, bloggers want distribution and exposure(Esther Dyson’s thoughts on Attention), and the technology service providers need to get paid or bought before Web 2.0 comes under the laws of gravity.