Venture Geek

Sphere is a relatively new service for searching and understanding what’s going on in the blogosphere. Now, you might say that the world hardly needed Yet Another Blog Search Engine — and in many ways you’d be right. But, Sphere has some interesting twists, most notably they seem to focus on notions of time — the ability to get up-to-the-minute information on what’s happening and search based on time frames.

I have no affiliation to Sphere, but they recently won me over with some excellent service, so I figured I’d share that story.

One of the features of Sphere I like is the custom RSS feed — I can set up a standing query and get a feed of results for that query. Thus, I can work it into my existing habits of RSS consumption. In my case, I was curious to know when people blog about Nicenet, the small non-profit I started many years ago with my friend Ben. Nicenet is a side project for us, but it’s a labor of love, and it grows purely on word of mouth — so, you can see why I might be curious to see when and how it gets mentioned on various blogs.

But, the custom feed I set up for Nicenet was getting an inordinate amount of spam. And worse, it was all porn spam. RSS spam — what is our world coming to? Anyway, needless to say it was upsetting to click through to a site thinking that some teacher was praising our little pet project only to be presented with hardcore action shots (and my wife was left wondering what exactly it was that I was doing on my computer that evening). Now, why porn sites are using the term “Nicenet” in order to attract people to their site is the subject of another post, but it pisses me off.

So, I wrote to Sphere. Not only did they get right back to me, they hooked me up with their experimental anti-spam filtering feeds, where you can set how strict you want your filtering to be. That feed got rid of almost all of the sites promising me hot stud-on-stud and barnyard action (I can’t wait to see the kinds of new Google searches that turn up this blog with that sentence on the page).

Of course, small companies are more able to address individual complaints because they don’t have to scale to thousands of such complaints. But, it’s surprisingly hard to even get a response to a query out of many web companies, so it’s always nice to see a new company take the time to give personal attention to an end user, and I think it’s worth giving a virtual pat on the back with some link love.