As of noon today, there were three Tiles on the Entertainment Sphere, which had together recorded 39 clicks from 77 unique visitors. That’s really good, because it indicates visitors’ willingness to follow the links (about half of visitors click a Tile), which translates into a real traffic increase for Tile owners.

At the moment my goal is to connect the project with people, and currently the facebook application I built is the best bet. The app allows you to vote for a Sphere, and see which Spheres your friends voted for, and those votes are displayed next to the live Spheres.

Not surprisingly, the Entertainment Sphere is leading the Spheres out of the gate in Tiles, visits, clicks and votes; A lot of people entertain themselves online. Me, I voted for the Information Sphere.

I dialogued with Room to Read (the charity themed with the Information Sphere) a bunch this month, who seemed pretty interested in my project. We were working on a Cause Marketing Agreement, but they emailed me last week with their decision to drop me out the bottom of their corporate lattice.

The drawback is that I can’t directly say, “A portion of each purchase goes to charity,” but on the plus side, I can work freely without a partnership to stress about. There are benefits to being small-time, which I’m proud to admit to. That said, I’m still dedicated to donating $50,000 if the project is a success.

On another note, I had an idea Friday morning about building a quick Spheres app for Facebook. Turns out I worked straight through the weekend, but the app seems to be working well, and I’m happy to have pounded it out in just a few days.

That’s all for now, catch you on the flip side.

The Statistics page is now complete with live charts, and the Home and About pages have been edited (thanks to Emily: Master Editor). I’ve also added some depth to the website with a star-field backdrop, and tested the Spheres in various web browsers.

My sister also decided she wanted to put her website onto a Sphere, which I was pretty happy about.

Next up, an email, a facebook group, and a press release.

I tried my best to find charities that inhabitants of the Spheres would appreciate and support. Certainly the most difficult Spheres to find charities for were the Entertainment and Shopping Spheres, but once I did, they felt exactly right. See the Charity page

Browsing these charities also changed my mind about how I wanted to distribute the donation money. Instead of donating $50,000 to the charity represented by the winning Sphere, $25,000 will go to the winning charity, and $5,000 to each other charity as their respective Spheres complete. I think it makes sense to donate to each of them.

I thought I’d try a different approach. I know as soon as someone uploads a Tile, s/he is going to want to see it active on the Sphere. So I threw together a “Find Tile by ID” routine this past week, where entering any Tile’s ID will highlight it on the Sphere. Go ahead, test it out (Tile IDs start at 00001).