Tailrank is a service that finds the best content from millions of blogs and provides a custom ranking specific to the user. Tailrank also offers a mobile version and users can import blog (OPML) subscriptions to build a personalized reading list.
Tailrank, founded by Kevin Burton, filters news according to your interests and those of others. Tailrank allows each user to share news and blogs with other members of the site. Tailrank finds the internet's hottest channels by indexing over 24M weblogs and feeds per hour. Tailrank uses Spinn3r, which is a blog spider that can be specialized using your own behavior insteading of creating a separate crawler. The Spinn3r API is free to researchers. The hottest stories are discovered by tracking conversations between blogs. Tailrank takes into consideration linking behavior, the text of the post, links in common with other users, text relevance, weblog ranking, past performance, and various other factors for recommendations. The ranking algorithm finds weblogs that are highly linked and discussed links and citations. The biggest challenge facing Tailrank is the amount of data that needs to be processed and the need to keep that data consistent within a distributed system, about 52TB of raw blog content a month and continuous processing of 160Mbits of IO.
Though Tailrank states that it primarily uses collaborative filtering, as noted on it's website, I'm led to believe there is some content filtering involved as well because it searches the text of the post and uses that information to make recommendations.
What I've found even more interesting is a blog that Tailrank Goes Blank, But Nobody Notices! It stated in July that the technology section of the site had no news whatsoever, it was completely blank and at one point the rest of the site went blank too. Michael Arrington, the blogger, emailed Kevin Burton who responded they were in the middle of an infrastructure upgrade. Michael noted that shortly after the site went live again but the stories were days old. Interestingly Michael write, "the fact that the technology ssection was down for weeks and no one seemed to notice or write about it suggests that the site isn't being read regularly by very many people...Tailrank is basically a showcase for the technology behind his other startup, Spinn3r, which provides blog indexing and ranking services to other sites. If Tailrank can't stay up to date with the news, how can partners rely on the underlying technology?" Which is indeed a valid point!
Tailrank has 5 tabs: General, Technology, Politics, Entertainment and Video. When I registered on the site, I attempted to click on all the tabs and actually the Entertainment section was not available. After checking back 20 minutes later it was available. I also noticed that while Tailrank claims to spider only "blogs", an article I clicked on regarding the total lunar eclipse directed me to CNN.com/technology. So I imagine all websites are being scanned for news at this point. Just to test out this theory, I clicked on a few more links regarding the lunar eclipse and was directed to articles on msnbc, usatoday and thestar.com. I also noticed the timeframes on the suggested readings. The most recent article was 16 hours ago and the oldest was 24 hours ago, with only 8 recommendations on the page. While the articles were relevant, I was rather disappointed to see "old" items. Given the lunar eclipse, ,which I watched and found completely fascinating, happened last night, I expected to see articles that were written less than 12 hours ago at best since the eclipse ended a little after midnight. The other thing I just noticed is that I clicked on the entertainment tab and was offered information regarding the lunar eclipse though most of the sites that the articles were snipped from where found under the technology section...and there is a technology tab on Tailrank so I wonder why the articles weren't placed there instead. Another interesting point that I noticed is the somewhat biasness of the recommendations. For instance, I clicked on the Politics tab and received an overwhelming amount of information regarding John McCain. Apparently, the majority of users are avid McCain followers (which explains the recommendations if we're using a collaborative system) or Tailrank has incorporated some type of baseline information into the system that automatically thinks/suggests certain items such as McCain. I'm actually not a McCain follower so maybe thats why Im a little disenchanted with the recommendations but I can't imagine I'm the only Tailrank user that has a different opinion be it with Politics, Technology or Entertainment...ok, I think that's enough nitpicking for now! lol
Tailrank.com (user info: oneup/oneup)
Tailrank Architecture - Learn How to Track Memes Across the Entire Blogosphere (Nov 19, 2007)
Tailrank Goes Blank, but Nobody Notices (Jul 2, 2007)
Tailrank: A Social News Recommendation and Filtering System Gets a New Look (Jan 12, 2006)
Tailrank - Social News Recommendation Engine (Nov 10, 2005)
Tailrank - A Tool for the Long Tail (Sept 21, 2005)
Tailrank - About Us
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