Tailrank adds some cool new features

6. March 2006, 16:00 UhrNews & IdeasChris0 comments

In case you don’t know about Tailrank. They’re a memetracker that tracks thousands of blogs, and then pulls out the most popular posts and puts them in order of popularity. In addition to some already cool features. Last week the announced the following:

Weblog Auto Configuration

This is by far the coolest feature. I’ve shown it to a few people in private and they were just amazed. I think Alex is going to flip out on this one!

Basically, this allows Tailrank to auto-detect the weblogs you visit from a list of the top 5000 blogs. All this is done via Ajax and due to the obvious privacy issues we ask your permission first.

Once we’ve figured out the blogs you’re reading, we then allow you to preview them and if everything looks good we import them into Tailrank.

This way new users can get up and running with a personalized Tailrank as soon as possible.

Want to take this for a spin? Just use Tailrank’s import system and click on ‘Auto Configure’.

(Note: This feature doesn’t work on IE right now but we’re working on having it fixed soon)

Weblog Recommendation

If you’ve used Amazon’s recommendation system you’re already familiar the “people who like this book also like…” feature. We’ve taken this concept a step further and applied it to Tailrank.

Once you’ve imported a few weblogs we then take our super cool ranking algorithms and try to find similar weblogs. This allows you to expand the number of weblogs you’re using Tailrank to monitor. The more sources you add to your filter the smarter Tailrank becomes.

Recommended Reading Lists

This also dovetails into Dave Winer’s idea of reading lists. Since our recommended weblogs are just a list of weblogs why not export these via OPML?

Reading lists are shared via RSS or OPML 2.0. This functionality is not 100% complete just yet but I wanted to get it out sooner rather than later. The one obvious bug is that we don’t provide a feed URL and only provide the weblog URL. I’m hoping to get this fixed over the next day. The other problem is that I need to figure out how to make the OPML a bit more obvious to use. One way is to use OPML auto-discovery but it might be possible to just have a link on the page. Thoughts Dave?

What I wanted to do is get this out sooner rather than later to get feedback from the memetracker community to see if this was useful.