When I was checking my stats on MyBlogLog today, I noticed a site under the “Where Readers Came From†section that seemed somewhat strange to me. The link began with television.aol.com and when I followed the link it took me to a CNN page with a story about Drew Carey.

I was quite impressed with myself, but confused at the same time. How did I get linked to from this site? Well, after a little investigation, I discovered that there was a link to my post about Drew Carey’s first episode of “The Price Is Right†that I wrote on Friday.

This still don’t explain how it got there. The link was listed under “From the Blogs†which is powered by Sphere. I’m not exactly what Sphere is or how it works (or how my blog got included in it) but I am already impressed by what it does. Apparently, Sphere has agreements with CNN, Reuters, and a variety of other news outlets to have their widget on the site and then links related articles to each other, including blog posts.

They do have a widget that I am considering installing, but in the meantime I am still looking for more information about how the program works and how I got included in it. I think this particular link only gained me probably one visitor, but I still think it’s pretty cool and being a part of it is a good way to get linked to from sites that you otherwise would probably never be linked from.

Has anyone else heard of this before?