Kevin Burton’s NEW FeedBlog

Tailrank is making a lot of progress recently. We just pushed a new release with a bunch of cool features which I think you guys are really going to enjoy.

New tabbed interface.

This will help make it easier to navigate the site. There are some more features in beta which will ship soon which will use these tabs (so stay tuned). The one major change is that the ‘filter’ feature which was a bit hidden at the top right now takes center stage and is renamed “My News Filter”. This is shown to all users and I think will make it clear that Tailrank offers personalization.

River of news style view.

I blogged about this late last week and this was based on a few comments by Dave Winer on river of news style memetrackers.

I’ve been a big fan of the river of news view for a long time now. I just didn’t know of the best way to adopt it within Tailrank. After reading the thread on Dave’s blog and talking about it with a few Tailrank users thing started to fall into place.

The initial plan was to swap out the main page with the river of news style view. After giving this a bit of thought I decided that this wasn’t the best way forward. The current mechanism replaces the sidebar with 30 links to the “Latest news of Interest”. You can then click the link in the title bar and view the page by itself. I’m also thinking about adding this as a tab to the top of the page.

You can also adjust the number of posts on the page by changing the level of ranking. By default it only show posts with a minimum of 6 links. You can adjust this to have either fewer links or more links (depending on how much time you have). Obviously the lower the number the more results it will return.

Based on feedback from this release I’ll consider adding this as the default view so if you guys think this is a good idea please leave a comment.

Memetrack this Blog.

This was inspired by discussion with Om Malik and Fred Wilson regarding tools for A-list bloggers. This allows you to quickly enter your blog URL and see which stories from your blog have been promoted by Tailrank.

You can also subscribe to this as an RSS feed or add it to the sidebar on your blog.

Moving forward I’m going to add more stats including overall ranking, number of subscribers, etc.

Featured News Filters.

One of the major innovations within Tailrank is that users can define their own river of news-based memetracker based on their OPML file or favorite list of blogs. The next major step after this would be sharing this filter with other members of the community.

To that end we’ve added a ‘Featured News Filter’ section on the home page. Right now we include the Web 2.0 Working Group (which was nice enough to include an OPML file on their site) and Phonescoop (for mobile devices). I’m planning on grabbing Robert Scoble’s OPML today from NewsGator and configure a featured filter for him as well.

If you’d like to create a filter you can just create an account, import your OPML, and I’ll add it to the featured list assuming I think other members of the community would find it compelling. (Send me an email if you’d like to talk about this).