The newly launched company Sphere is poised to make a very positive contribution to the quality of life in the Blogosphere. Their semantic search application can be launched from within a single post, by clicking on their spice-colored icon. It will find other weblogs with related subject matter.

We have included their app — Sphere It! — at the end of this post, and we urge all of our readers to try it out. You will need to go to the Single Post Page by clicking on the permalink green title above, just as you would to check out Trackbacks or read Comments.

We appreciate the efforts of developers who create tools to facilitate interaction among bloggers. Clearly, they expend a lot of “blood, sweat and tears” to give us service. But many of those constructs inherently contain inducements for bloggers to alter their behavior in order to achieve a high ranking with respect to a particular tool. The time and space used to play the game for a score is diverted from the effort of sharing ideas. We perceive that tendency as a detriment to the Blogosphere.

As initially conceived, the algorithms associated with link totals and traffic statistics were expected to measure relevance and quality, similar to stock price and product success in a capitalistic economy. But the analogy fails, because while one has to spend real money out of pocket for a commercial product, and some value judgement is required, link totals and traffic statistics can be scammed without sacrifice. Open trackbacks, linkfests, coalitions, and carnivals artificially inflate link totals. Blogclickers distort traffic data, and this type of cheating is especially egregious when culpable blogs carry pay-per-click advertising.

We first posted about Sphere this past Saturday, a few days after we learned about it and as soon as we had time to work with it and get a feeling for its capability. We recognized at once that it had great potential for enhancing the global conversation, while avoiding the above mentioned pitfalls in the other commonly used tools. Later, while reading an article written by Sphere CEO Tony Conrad, our intuition was confirmed:

A few questions came up about the difference between Sphere It! and Technorati This! Both products try to give you content from the blogosphere that’s related to the web page you are currently reading. Sphere It! does this by doing semantic analysis of the page you are on and finding blog posts that talk about the same topic. Technorati This! does it by looking for blog posts that link to the page you are on. So if you are reading an article on the new CIA director, Sphere It! will give you the most relevant blog posts that also talk about him. Technorati This! will only give you the posts that happen to link to the specific article you are reading (which often miss or have no results at all)….

This … exposes some weaknesses that a link based approach (Technorati This!) has vs. a semantic analysis approach (Sphere It!):

1. A lot of content has zero links from bloggers therefore the results set will be zero or shallow
2. The freshest content is unlikely to have any matches or very few matches because bloggers haven’t had enough time to link to the content
3. When there are results, they’re time based so you don’t get relevance, just the luck of chronology

Sphere It! results are:

1. Immediate – we’re not dependent on links – we just look at the content, figure out what it’s talking about and then look at blog content and see who’s talking about similar things but from a blogger perspective
2. We’re showing results for contextually relevant as well as links to the article

The considerations listed in Tony’s article are mechanistic, but there is an important social value that derives from purely semantic search (as opposed to semantic results that are ranked by traffic, link totals or freshness). Suppose an outstanding subject matter expert begins a weblog, and writes his or her first post. The new blogger will be way below the radar for all of the tools currently in use. In the eyes of Sphere It!, however, that person will be on equal footing with all the other bloggers from day one. And democracy of discussion is the most useful approach for maximizing the collective intelligence of the weblog community (consider the Wikipedia model).

In the final analysis, tools are created based on the developer’s chosen model of the Blogosphere. There are severeal hypotheses, based on comparison to the “real world.” Is it a marketplace of ideas (Blogshares), a community (Technorati) or an ecosystem (Truth Laid Bear)? Do ideas spread virally (Memeorandum)?

Sphere does not create a model based on the real world. It addresses weblogs as part of the real world. The Blogosphere is, in reality, a world of words. And Sphere deals with exactly that, and gets it right.

This app is catching on so fast there is already a name for devotees. Just as Star Trek had its trekkies, Sphere It! has its spherons. Count us in.

Now go try it out!