Sphere is a new Blog search engine. It is not live yet, but will be soon, its creator Tony Conrad told us last week. We were waiting to try it out, but Om Malik is already pointing to it. We should note, we're not sure whether the world can really use another one of these. Though Om says he has tinkered with its beta version, and is impressed.

Sphere (which is the new name for Yodel, the company we previously posted about here) has come up with some algorithms to solve the filtering problem, of finding the blogs that have more links, more authority, more credibility and so on -- and parsing this in different ways. For example, it apparently has pronoun checker, where too many I's could mean a personal blog, and therefore treat the blog in a different way. It will also match blog content with relevant web articles from mainstream media. This does sound interesting.

Conrad, by the way, is the guy who backed email company Oddpost, which was sold to Yahoo. He was a partner at VSP Capital for a while -- but left before it imploded recently.