My Tumblr/Stumbler Hybrid
- A Unique Spin on Sharing the Best Sites
Load a Sphere, click around.
Learn About the Project
Spheres of the Web is an Independent Project by Christopher X Gerber.
Load a Sphere, click around.
Spheres of the Web is an Independent Project by Christopher X Gerber.
Spheres of the Web is a banner advertising site devised by Chris Gerber to help repay his student loans.
Using the standard advertising strategy of today, it is the pull of lucrative content that delivers people to ads: movies have previews, shows have commercials, sites have banners.
Spheres of the Web aims to use the advertising medium itself to attract user traffic/attention.
Details can be found in the pages below.
The word community usually refers to a group of people organized around common values and living in a common location.
Online however, users with common interests need not be localized to be considered a community (the online gaming community, for example, is disbursed across many countries).
The Spheres localize both web pages and users under common interests, in an attempt to concentrate the online content of 2010 into a permanent collection.
| The Entertainment Sphere : Life is hard. Time to relax with a movie, a book, a game, music and pictures is well earned. This Sphere is for sites that provide entertainment. | |
| The Technology Sphere : Tools have advanced rapidly in the last century. Technology is the fastest growing aspect of human civilization, and the web is both a product of and a catalyst to it. This Sphere is for sites that concern technology, or provide tools to users. | |
| The Business Sphere : Business is the cornerstone of modern economics. It provides employment and pay, both online and off. This Sphere is for sites about business. | |
| The Information Sphere : Knowledge is key. The web has become a powerful resource with its ability to serve information at lightning speed. This Sphere is for sites that connect us with reference and educational material. | |
| The Earth Sphere : Our planet provides life. Today we are growing more concerned for it, and we can use the web to dialogue about it. This Sphere is for sites concerned about the earth, its inhabitants, and all things natural. | |
| The Shopping Sphere : We all have needs. Shopping is the modern word for 'trade', and today it proves less time-consuming than ever with the help of the web. This Sphere is for sites that sell or review goods. |
Promoting a website can be frustrating, especially on a budget. Using an Advertisement Banner to permanently link your site from one of the Spheres can provide you with targetted traffic and character.
The Advertisement Banner is built from square blocks of pixels, and illustrated by you. It is uploaded to the Sphere you think best suits your site or the audience you are after (your targetted traffic).
Your banner's position is random on its Sphere, but always displays a title and description with the permanent link to your site.
The Spheres illustrate the different goals people have on the web (do business; find information). Since each Sphere corresponds to a different goal, the number of Advertisement Banner blocks on each Sphere indicates the popularity of that goal today.
The contest between the Spheres is a popularity contest, but also a fundraiser. A different charity is sponsored by each Sphere. The first Sphere to populate to 100% capacity will donate $25,000, and each Sphere after that will donate $5,000, for a total project donation of $50,000.
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0.25% |
0.00% |
0.04% |
0.00% |
0.08% |
0.00% |
Total Blocks Remaining: 62,170
Total Blocks Used: 38
There are a few conditions pertaining to Advertisement Banner upload.
My name is Chris Gerber, I live in Vancouver, Canada, and I am the creator, designer and developer of Spheres of the Web. I'm a dreamer, and I believe that the ingredients for success and revolution can be found within each person.
Back in January of 2009, I left my research at UBC to take stock of my life. I wanted to bring something really fresh to the world, but I had this student debt looming over me.
So I came up with an idea: Build an advertisement site offering affordable advertising in the form of permanent link banners, and information about the web and its users in 2010.
Since the Spheres represent different interests of the online community, I thought it would be fitting to find charities in these same veins.
There are many children in North America and worldwide that are faced with illness and physical ailments who find it difficult to move beyond their circumstances. Child's Play is a non-profit organization that provides hospitalized kids with movies, video games, and toys, to help them transcend depression and hopelessness.
Technology is growing in leaps and bounds, but forces against the freedom of software use are growing too. Large software corporations continually inhibit the freedom individuals have when it comes to software. The Free Software Foundation aims to preserve, protect and promote the freedom to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute computer software, and to defend the rights of Free Software users. For those of you familiar with the GNU, the Free Software Foundation is its principal organizational sponsor.
Business is thriving on the web, but not so much among the low-income demographics around the world. Opportunity International is one of the trail-blazers of microfinance, a method of aid by which people in poverty can participate in lending, savings, insurance and transformational training programs. Through these small lending and savings programs, impoverished entrepeneurs around the world have a chance to help their neighbors by stimulating economic growth.
Room to Read seeks to transform the lives of millions of children in developing countries by focusing on literacy and gender equality in education. Working in collaboration with local communities, partner organizations, and governments, Room to Read develops literacy skills and a habit of reading among primary school children, and supports girls to complete secondary school with the relevant life skills to succeed in school and beyond.
The Earth is a major concern today. Friends of the Earth is a grassroots organization that challenges the current model of economic and corporate globalization, and promotes environmentally sustainable and socially just solutions. Of their many campaigns, sustainable energy, deforestation, genetically modified foods, and economic justice top the list.
Everyone has needs, but in many places they are not met. While we build websites and blogs, and buy groceries once a week, others are starving. The World Food Programme is the world's largest humanitarian agency. It is part of the UN, but is voluntarily funded. In 2010, they aim to reach more than 90 million people in 73 countries with food.
The opinions expressed through Spheres of the Web and those by the websites therein do not neccesarily reflect those of the charity organizations listed above.
Number of Advertisement Banner blocks sold to date
Number of Advertisement Banner clicks to date
Number of unique visitors to date
Number of votes cast on facebook
There are no Advertisement Banners on this Sphere yet.
There are no Advertisement Banners on this Sphere yet.
There are no Advertisement Banners on this Sphere yet.
Advertisement Banners promote your site. Most bloggers and website-keepers know that building a network of links is tantamount to a successful reader-base. But it isn't as easy at it sounds (I worked a blog for a few months myself, but resigned after failing to build a good readership). A Advertisement Banner can help to broaden your outreach, at a low one-time cost (as opposed to facebook ads or google adsense, where you are charged per click or impression).
Advertisement Banners are visual. An Advertisement Banner essentially provides the same function as any standard link, but with an additional emphasis on style and visual esthetic. While most links on the Web are displayed as plain text, Advertisement Banners on Spheres of the Web are displayed both textually and graphically. Creating a Advertisement Banner allows you to introduce your website to the eyes of your visitors, even before they visit.
Spheres are tuned to different interests. When you upload your Advertisement Banner to Spheres of the Web, you have the choice of which Sphere it will live on. Choosing an appropriate Sphere will help bring visitors to your site who share similar interests, since they are likely to be browsing the Sphere that interests them most. Some call it targetted traffic.
Each Sphere has a character of its own, but often a website and its Advertisement Banner concern more than just one field of interest. For instance a website about viral marketing might work equally well on the Technology, Business and Information Spheres.
In such circumstances, it is best to think of what type of audience you are looking for (technophiles, executives, or students, for example), and decide that way. There is also nothing to stop you from putting the same Advertisement Banner on multiple Spheres, to expand your reach.
Each Advertisement Banner is formed by connecting one or more blocks together. Two characteristics led to this block size. First, each Sphere has a three hundred pixel radius — a good size for most screen resolutions these days. Second, each Sphere has a surface that is divided into a little over ten thousand blocks (10,368 to be exact). These two constraints led to this size of block.
Any Advertisement Banner made from an arrangement of connected blocks is accepted. A 39-pixel square Advertisement Banner is allowed, for instance, as is an L-shaped Advertisement Banner having a height of 39 pixels (3 blocks) and a width of 26 pixels (2 blocks).
Yes.
PageRank (PR) is one of the factors that determine how high a webpage ranks in Google's search engine result pages. Essentially, the PR of a webpage is determined by how many other webpages link to it, and what each of their PRs is (and whether a "nofollow" attribute is set).
However, it is well-known that links inside a Flash application (such as the Spheres) are not factored in, since they are hidden in the application's encoding.
In order to solve this problem, a Listings Page is provided. Since these listings can inhabit the same webpage as the Spheres (try it — navigate to a Sphere first, then the listings page), the PRs of the Spheres are effectively delivered to the linked pages (the nofollow attribute is not set in listings links).
Good question. Unfortunately there isn't really a good answer to this question, aside from saying that this is the smallest number I managed to boil the many interests of the online community down to. Truth be told, I specifically wanted a Sphere to represent the earth, and all things natural, but the rest come from the large numbers of websites presently that care about each of these topics.
(Oh, I noticed that the cube — the linear counterpart to the sphere — has six faces. Maybe six spheres arranged properly makes a cube with spherical faces. 4D? Okay, just rambling here...)
Yes. The number of satelites orbiting a given Sphere depends loosely on how many Advertisement Banners inhabit its surface. The satelites are there to represent the "buzz" around that Sphere.
Spheres of the Web is an endeavor I single-handedly built from the ground up in my apartment in Vancouver. The road has been long, and at times difficult, but it has led to something entirely original. Others who value personal creativity and innovation will appreciate the work for what it stands for in the world.
To the bloggers and webmasters out there, this site both promotes and is a product of individual effort.
To the dabblers in philosophy and critical thinking, Spheres of the Web is a tool by which we can analyze not only online activity, but collective human interest. The contest will reveal what we are preoccupied with, where we spend our time and thought.
For everyone else, this site can provide a loosely guided jump-board into the various regions of the Web. Whether acting as a distraction, a research tool, or an eye-opener, Spheres of the Web can be of use to everyone.
Comments or questions? Send an email to Christopher X Gerber, or you can send mail to:
Spheres of the Web
2200 West 5th Ave
Apt.2
Vancouver, BC V6K 1S3
Canada
Press? Call 604-816-4873
