As you can see in the image below, we’re powering a module on People’s new NewsStorm product, where they aggregate content around a given topic.  In this instance, we’re exclusively showing related content from third party sources.  Incidentally, it’s the first time we’ve done this, not showing any internal content.  Over the past 18 months, we’ve seen publishers become much more open and interested in including third party content on their sites as the old walled garden mentality has diminished.  People.com followed suit and we think it’s a great decision.  A visitor to this page can access lots of relevant content now from disparate sources and we think that makes the offering more valuable to readers.  We’re looking forward to many more Britney catastophes, celeb babies and award ceremonies to fuel the NewsStorm fire:)

So far, not the case. We like the access to resources, the enthusiastically warm welcome throughout AOL and autonomy. Net net, we’re very excited about AOL and how it will impact our product and distribution footprint. There is an immense amount of work still to do in order to a) provide our customers with the best related content technology and approach; b) provide a more comprehensive set of “self service” tools that enable all partners, small, medium and larger to quickly launch our service; and c) enable publishers to most efficiently determine the best ways to distribute and monetize their content. We’ve got good instincts about AOL, having been down this path a few times before. Here is a link to a video that Derick Mains shot last week at Web 2.0.

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. Wordpress has grown to become one of the largest domains on the web with 140M uniques and 700M monthly page views at last count. That’s serious business and so we’re super psyched to be working with them! It also doesn’t hurt that they’re a fellow True Ventures portfolio company Many thanks to Raanan, M@, Barry and Toni for helping push this forward for us. Matt has more to say about the partnership here.

Where to begin, there is so much to say but we’ll try to be informative, yet brief for today’s ‘get it now, read it fast’ Internet reader. We are very excited about becoming part of AOL and wanted to share with you what it will mean for Sphere and our publisher partners, including “mainstream” media, micro-publishers and blog sites.

Sphere has always been a publisher/ blogger -centric company, even in our early days as a fledgling blog search engine. We founded Sphere with a mission to make contextually relevant connections between all forms of content (mainstream media articles, archived articles, videos, blogs, photos, ads) that enable the reader to go deep on topics of interest. We also, by virtue of our starting point, set out to be a vehicle to enable the individual voice to join the conversation as well as expose their voice to a broader audience of readers. The benefit of joining the ‘sphere is straightforward: publishers/ bloggers who successfully promote distribution of their content and that of others will be in a position to derive more value (aka….make more money, gain more influence, etc.) from media distribution.

Back when we released the Sphere Related Content Widget in 2006, the response told us we’d tapped into a new phenomenon of openness. A bit of a perfect storm as the launch of our service coincided with Publishers starting to embrace the virtues of linking to content outside their site as well as exploring ways to connect to the broader conversation happening in the blogosphere. While many savvy publishers have embraced these concepts, the fact is that there is an immense amount of work still to do in order to a) provide our customers with the best related content technology and approach; b) provide a more comprehensive set of “self service” tools that enable all partners, small, medium and larger to quickly launch our service; and c) enable publishers to most efficiently determine the best ways to distribute and monetize their content.

Our business approach will also remain unchanged - start-up-style, with the same hunger and spirit Sphere was founded on. We are joining AOL at an opportune time. AOL is doing what great, sustainable business do every so often – they’re reinventing themselves. As the business model of the oldest and one of the biggest Internet businesses evolves, Sphere becomes an important piece of their strategy to reach across and engage the web. In the past year, we’ve watched AOL as a partner, move aggressively to build their audience (new services, new web-site that interacts with users, acquisitions in the community space) and their Platform-A advertising business, and they’re making great progress on both fronts. They’ve seen steady growth as a result of the extensive programming and product upgrades they’ve made in the past year. Platform-A, meanwhile, reaches 90% of the domestic online audience and has some of the most sophisticated targeting and measurement tools on the market, positioning them very well in the growing online display ad market. We think it’s a huge advantage to become part of a suite of services that understands how Internet users access/ consume content, and how to intelligently monetize in tandem with that content. This is a win-win for our partners, AOL and Sphere.

We want to acknowledge our team who has made Sphere a success: Co-Founders Martin Remy and Steve Nieker who made it all possible with their vision and amazing abilities; Mike Garfias, Alex Bendig, Andy Cabell, Anne Dorman and Jeff Yolen who joined us early on when we had an idea and two nickels; Adam Embick, Josh Guttman, Kevin Cowan, Sven Henderson, Troy Vitullo and Michael Harzheim who’ve jumped in and have helped us accelerate our growth seamlessly — you rock! If you have a chance to pass them a note, please do.

We humbly thank everyone involved: our awesome team; advisors (Josh Macht; Toni Schneider; Matt Mullenweg; Mike Monteiro; Ron McCoy; Mary Hodder; and Scott Kurnit); investors, many of which wear halo’s (True Ventures; Trident Capital; Radar Partners; Hearst Interactive; Blacksmith; Phil Black; Will Hearst; David Mahoney; Mike Winton; Scott Kurnit; Vince Vannelli; Adaptive Path); our board (Venetia Kontogouris; Phil Black; Darcy Bentley; Scott Kurnit); publisher/ blog partners; the gang at Oddpost who showed us the way to build frugally/ intelligently; OM Malik, Mike Arrington, Kara Swisher, Dan Farber, Matt Marshall and the many other bloggers who’ve partnered, written, and given us advice; our attorney (Stefan Clulow); Howard Zeprun and Ira Parker who insured the dialog kept moving forward; Jen Consalvo who understood our potential and introduced to a number of AOL groups, Lewis DVorkin and Bill Wilson who paid us the nicest compliment of all in offering to acquire our company and then doing so, family and friends. We’re thrilled to be part of this new genesis!

Here’s some of what we’ve been up to:

• we were named one of the 100 most disruptive new media services by Tony Perkins’ AlwaysOn Network;
• we kicked off our second ad campaign with A-list brands like Symantec, Verizon and Dell;
• we added contextual video links to our offering, made our widget draggable and introduced embedded text links for micro-publishers;
• we turned our really bad web-site into a really good one that reflects our focus on servicing publishers, both mainstream media and blog sites;
• we updated our blog and we actually posted with some level of, well, regularity;
• we added two new team members, increasing our total team size to twelve and bringing us closer to conglomerate status; and
• we turned on our service for a lot of new partners like Newsweek, Salon, CBS, Washington Post and high profile blogs like Gothamist (SFist) to a growing list of over 60,000 sites.

For the quantitative types, especially you competitors, here are how things are looking lately - some Q1, 2008 stats:

• 6.3 billion Sphere Related Content icons displayed, generating over 25 billion potential content links; and
• 455 million monetizeable page-views, +50.1% vs. Q4, 2007.

More exciting stuff coming soon, stay tuned.