Sphere is becoming my new favorite blog search tool, especially their “sphere it!” search. Just drag their handy bookmarklet onto your browser’s toolbar, and then when you’re reading a page and want to find blogs about the same content, click the bookmarklet. Sphere analyzes the content of the page and searches for related blogs. It’s a lot easier than trying to construct a relevant keyword search for Technorati, Ice Rocket, etc. For instance, when I was reading about the O’Reilly Web 2.0 trademark unbelievableness over at Hmm, I just clicked the “Sphere It!” button to get several good takes on the subject. Doing a search for “O’Reilly Web 2.0 trademark” in Technorati or Ice Rocket gets some of that good content, but mixes it with posts that are about only “O’Reilly” or “Web 2.0″, etc. Sphere included this post by feydakin. I had never read this blog before, but it treated the topic with insight and entertainment. Sphere might be a good way to find those little-known gems out there by better focusing the search for content.

TDavid gives us the PHP code to add a “Sphere it” link to the end of your WordPress posts if they contain a minimum word count.

OK, that’s it. I’m done with cocomment.com. Too many glitches. Uninstall the Greasemonkey script, remove the bookmarklet, take the script off my web page. From now on, I’m only using co.mments to track my comments.

I compared the two services here. The glitch that sent me over the edge is that cocomment just asked me for my login information again, even though I’m logged in. If that were the first glitch, I could ignore it. But often, it fails to gather the information from the web page, or it fails to submit the comment back to the original blog after gathering the information. Sometimes the Greasemonkey script tries to press the bookmarklet but fails with an error. Plus, since cocomment doesn’t seem to track all comments to the entry, I hardly ever use it for tracking anyway.