Jul 2, 2007 01:55 PM
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Wed Feb 10
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A little-known web site got a concussion this weekend, as TechCrunch reports. Tailrank, a news aggregator by Rojo co-founder and frequent Valleywag target Kevin Burton, went blank this weekend while its backend was getting updated. Not even a blip on most people's radar, but here's why Tailrank could have mattered (and how Kevin might be turning it into something special).
Tailrank works kind of like Google News or Memeorandum (at least to the user). Like Google News, it purports to offer personalized results based on a user's reading habits. But Tailrank includes not only news stories but blog posts.
The upshot is that a working personalized news service would be much better to read in the morning than, say, the Drudge Report. Newspaper sections aren't enough. For instance, I like watching for "Tom Cruise is crazy" news, but I don't care about the rest of the gossip section. I want to know about the presidential race, but mostly just about Obama, Romney, and Giuliani. I want news about Russia claiming the North Pole.
I could fiddle with a bunch of searches in Google News and get every single update about these stories. I could subscribe to some RSS feeds and waste hours a week editing them. But I'd rather just have a page to scan and mark the stories I like. The whole system should feel invisible to me.
And that's just what Tailrank is supposed to do. And is it dead? Well, not quite; Burton says his site went blank because he was updating the backend technology, spinn3r, a licensed blogosphere crawler. If Burton is unable to make Tailrank a marketable news service, then someone else could license spinn3r and do so.
Then, yes, we could all read it on our iPhones. God.
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