Transcript: TailRank the memetracker that lets you see what blogs are talking about

This transcript is from a PodTech.net podcast at:
http://www.podtech.net/scobleshow/technology/1259/tailrank-the-memetracker-that-lets-you-see-what-blogs-are-talking-about

Guest: Kevin Burton -TailRank
Host: Robert Scoble - ScobleShow

Kevin Burton -TailRrank
My name is Kevin Burton, I'm the Founder and CEO of TailRank, and today I'm going to demo our product, and basically what it does is it's a Meme Tracker. It tracks the top 150,000 blogs in the blogosphere and tries to find what people are actually talking about at any given time. So, for example, right now on the front of the screen was the fact that Jason Calacanis just resigned from AOL and I think there are 137 bloggers talking about that right now. So, I'll give you a demo here real quick. So, basically this is the homepage of TailRank. This is what you'll see when you come to the site. You'll have to forgive me for doing the demo over EVDL, so it might be a little bit slow, but it should be okay. What you're seeing here is just a general overview.

These are all sites, we support at, Technology, Politics and Entertainment. We also support a customized version of TailRank. What you're seeing is the top story right now, you can actually click this little button here and collapse them all, and then you can see all the rest of the story. So, the second story is that British Choice of Family-Planning has been criticized, and then the British Passports have been cracked, which is kind of scary actually, I hope you have read that story but it's bit disturbing. What's interesting is you can actually click the story, we're going to load it into another Tab, so I can show you the difference. We actually show you, everyone that's talking about this specific meme any given point of time.

So, we're just going to Page Down and you can see all of 37 bloggers. So, the goal is to make it easier for -- if you are a geek and you happened to be reading a lot of RSS feeds you'll end up seeing all these. But, this way you can see all the stories in one place, and you don't necessarily have to be an RSS geek to get into that meme. We have a couple of cool features, for example, we actually thumbnail the remote sites, so you can actually see it in line, so where you can quickly glance like it's TechCrunch for example has a pretty distinctive UI.

So, if you're just glancing it, you can see the thumbnail. You can know what site it links to. We also have verticals, so we have Tech, Politics, and Entertainment and these are pretty interesting because not everybody is interested in general stories. So, on the front page of -this site -- in the front page just say, you have Politics and Entertainment, but, if you're not interested in those, you can just narrow down to specific topic. So, here you can see the Tech version of Tailrank and the top story is that again Calacanis leaving AOL. But the second one is that Yahoo! goes on a shopping binge and I think they acquired two other major sites today. We go to Politics, again the story on Bush, story on Pelosi. We have a lot of US blogs, so US politics pretty dominates our index pretty much. We're looking to expand that. More stories on Entertainment, so this is Borat, PlayStation 3, O.J. Simpson's Confession.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
What's the difference between what's here and what's over on the right side?

Kevin Burton -TailRank
Oh, I'm sorry. So, we do on the right side is we actually show Breaking News. News that's actually breaking right now. Oh! Wow, Sandra Day O'Connor says something about attempts to kill off the Supreme Court, which is -- that's crazy. Anyway, that broke 59 minutes ago. These are all stories that are less than an hour old. So, if you are using TailRank, you can actually figure out what's happening, what stories are breaking and you can -- if you are a News Junky like me, you can actually see those actually as are happening in real time.

One of the other cool features that we really like is we have what's called a Personal Meme Tracker and under the 'My Tail' button. Basically, what this does is, you can subscribe to a -- you can monitor a few Web Blogs so, like I can Scobleizer's Web Blog, TechCrunch, here I'm monitoring Om Malik's Blog, 'GigaOm,' and because of the fact that I flagged this blog, I subscribed to it, I can then -it shows up in my Filter, so I can narrow down the list of our stories you're actually watching. What I think is really cool is, you can actually boost up the relevance. So, the problem most people had is that they get way too much news.

So, this way you can actually say, "show me only stories but with like 15 links or more," and we've added this new feature called 'track this thread.' I'm going to load that up and what this is -- this is what -- we actually did at 2.0 over these with a whole new UI and this whole thread is about MyBlogLog, Yahoo! just MyBlogLog. This is it -- blogged about. These are all the stories within that cluster. The really cool thing is that I can now add this to my IM. So, if I type in my -- I think I'm on IM here, let's see if I can get on IM. It doesn't look like I'm on IM. This is the problem doing a demo over at EVDL (ph) I guess. All right, so we're logging into IM.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
So, what are you trying to do?

Kevin Burton -TailRank
Well, there is a feature we have where you can actually subscribe to a thread. So that Breaking Stories will then get IM's to you. So, the cool thing about that is if a story is breaking like a hot like this, Sandra Day O'Connor saying that the Supreme Court was trying to be -- they were going to try to get rid of the Supreme Court, that's really disturbing. So, what you can do is you can add your IM handle, and then go back to work, and now every time a story, a follow-up comes out on this meme, you can then be alerted directly through TailRank. So, it turns out to be a pretty hot feature.

So, yeah, we just clicked - we've got an IM that we're prompting to make sure to confirm our subscription, we just click this link, and that's it. We subscribed the Feed Crier and so every time TailRank publishes a story about this, you'll get it directly through IM. So, it's basically pretty much it in a nutshell. We're working on a new version of the site TailRank 2.1 just pretty cool features, I'm pretty excited about, so I'm sure you'll check it out.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Thank you very much.

Kevin Burton -TailRank
Thanks.