I’m trying out the Sphere Wordpress plugin, so you will see a link at the bottom of most posts. If you click on it, it’s supposed to find related things on the web. In my tests so far, the things it finds do not seem very relevant, but I’ll let it there for a bit and see what it does.
Update (6 days later): disabled. I never saw any interesting links in the Sphere results, so gone it is.
4 responses so far ↓
1
tony conrad
// Apr 5, 2007 at 12:45 am
Hi – thx for trying it out. It seems to be working well in your site. Thx again for checking it out. Best,
Tony Conrad
CEO & Founder Sphere
2
Hitchhiker
// Apr 5, 2007 at 12:53 am
Tony – thanks for your comment. I am a bit puzzled by the links that Sphere suggests. Take, for example, this post. The first suggestion is another post that says “I’m trying out Sphere” – so far so good. But for all the others, the only thing in common seems to be that they are using variations of the Cutline theme, which I also use. Does Sphere take the whole page when making comparisons? Could it be better to use just the text of the post?
3
Martin
// Apr 5, 2007 at 5:47 pm
Hi – Sphere always attempts to get the full text of a post. If a site’s feed contains full text, that’s idea, otherwise we parse the HTML and determine the post heuristically. Our heuristics work well for the most part, but because of the huge variety of blog engines and themes, we do sometimes extract parts of the template along with the text. You should find that for longer posts, the text will outweigh any template “bycatch”, though.
Thanks for trying out the plugin and for your analysis.
Martin Remy
CTO & Founder, Sphere
4
tony conrad
// Apr 5, 2007 at 6:34 pm
Martin – thx for replying.