Kevin Burton has been hard at work on TailRank for a while now. Not only has he been hard at work developing and improving what is turning into a very novel application of the social dynamics of the blogosphere, but he's also been hard at work inventing a new approach to micro-funding a startup.
I have to admit, for a while I wasn't really grokking TailRank. This was, I believe, in part due to the user interface, which was a little scattered. Recently, however, Kevin has done a couple of things that make the whole concept a lot easier to deal with. Firstly, the interface has changed a lot. It is far cleaner and easier to look at. Secondly, there is now a neat little bookmarklet which lets you share things on TailRank while browsing.
I'm still holding off on a deep dive, but wanted to write about the main feature that I currently use : the link recommendations. There is not a huge amount of difference here with other systems like del.icio.us, however, I find the interface just a little more approachable - clicking on the share button next to a link to add tags and share them.
Something that would be interesting to see would be an ability to track how many times a link is found in TailRank - or any other recommendation system - and then blogged about. This might be done by the use of a specific tag, or better, the ability in the TailRank interface to open a post editor for your blog with the link already created (a little like TypePad's QuickPost capability). TailRank could then measure its contribution and influence on the blogosphere.
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