Kevin Burton’s NEW FeedBlog

I finally had some time tonight to finish up our feed delta API within Tailrank.

This new API allows a developer to get a set of blog posts added to the blogosphere since a given date.

Return a list of feed items new to TailRank since a given date. Feed items are blog posts from RSS/Atom feeds that TailRank is currently indexing. This allows developers to obtain a snapshot of the blogosphere as our spiders are running. This reduces a significant amount of work for the average developer including spam suppression, priority scheduling, Atom/RSS protocol issues, etc.

Right now the output is only RSS 2.0 but I plan to add Atom 1.0 as well as the AHAH microformat.

The licensing will be very flexible. If you’re a non-profit doing something cool we’ll most likely give you free access. If you’re a for-profit we’ll have to work out a licensing arrangement. Next week I’ll have an API key registration system available and all methods will require a key.

Our index currently consists of about 98% English blogs. The goal is to have it as 100% English and then to split languages into dedicated indexes. This way we’ll have an English version of TailRank, French version, Japanese, etc.

We’re currently indexing about 30,000 blogs. These are blogs with very high ranking (essentially the top 30k blogs in the blogosphere)

Maximum index time is around 60 minutes. I’ll be adding XMLRPC ping prioritization in the next week.

Right now our API is still beta. If you have any problems or feature requests please feel free to send me an email.