Good Stuff!

Tony Conrad gave us a call a few weeks ago and asked if we could contribute a little polish to this nifty new weblog search engine called Sphere.

Specifically, he asked for some tone, just a few words to really give the tool just enough personality. We rewrote the instructional copy, and presented a few options for taglines. They liked these so much, that they couldn't choose just one and put a few into rotation.

The tagline in this case, is particularly important. It needs to sell what the empty box does. There are so many search engines out there, why should people care about this one? "Extremely innovative algorithm" is a phrase that fires up only a small, very special group of people. Many search engines talk in terms of numbers, how many sites, how many milliseconds, how many results. No one cares, really.

People care about getting to the good stuff. And when you are talking blogs, the question is not only how do you find good information in information within weblogs, but how do you really find the good weblogs. Weblogs are mired in same the crisis of confidence that affected the Web a few years ago (anyone can put anything on an Internet Webpage, how do you know whether that information is reliable or the source is trustworthy?).

We can't eliminate the spammers, the ranters, and the bloviators, but we can drown them at the bottom of the results and let the quality rise to the surface to be discovered. This is what Sphere endeavors to do, and this is what will make more people care about weblogs, which is a good thing because weblogs put our friends' kids through school.

And we made Sphere a nice logo, too.

Written by Erika Hall on May 3, 2006 |