AOL (NYSE:TWX) has acquired blog aggregator and indexing service Sphere.
Sphere provides a "more like this" functionality, surfacing blogs and other content related to the piece of content a user is reading. If you read the Wall Street Journal and see links to related blogs at the end of a story, that's Sphere in action. I first wrote about Sphere nearly two years ago.
Sphere has been effective in penetrating the publishing and media market. In addition to the Journal, they count Time, Reuters, CNN, Newsweek and others among their clients. Sphere also offers the "Sphere It" widget, which returns relevant content back to partner sites.
This is not the first AOL acquisition of a Web 2.0 startup. As Kara Swisher points out, they've bought video search engine Truveo and Userplane, among others. It's just that they haven't done much with them after the acquisition. It's the same problem that Yahoo has had with its many bolt-on acquisitions. There doesn't seem to be a strategy to cultivate them and expose them to their wide user base.
Congratulations to Tony Conrad, Jeff Yolen and the Sphere team.
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