I’m a bit ashamed to say that I’ve only just checked out TailRank by Kevin Burton, who is the top poster on my blog but yet I haven’t checked out his blog for a while. Anyway, normally when I find a new tagging/social bookmarking/global site my eyes glaze over. But, rather than being another Digg or del.icio.us clone, TailRank introduces some very cool and useful ideas that I think could make it the best site in the genre.
TailRank works in a similar way to Digg in that the most popular stories bubble up to the top, and to Del.icio.us in that users can add tags to stories, but it also calculates custom rankings specific to each user. So, if I’m reading this correctly it will promote more stories that it thinks I will find interesting based on what I tag, but also stories that are tagged by users who have similar tastes to me.
This for me is the smart piece, as although some amazing links can be found via Digg, the majority of items that make it onto the homepage are of no interest to me. With Digg and Del.icio.us the most popular stories are automatically promoted, rather than the stories that I will find interesting. With TailRank I (hopefully) will only see stories that I want to read and so far it seems to be working.
This process can be speeded up by importing your OPML so that it knows what feeds and sites you normally read. Even adding this feature is handy, as its useful to see which stories in my daily read other people find interesting.
I’d definitely recommend checking it out for yourself as I think this will be one of the winners next year.
