This transcript is from a PodTech.net podcast at:
http://www.podtech.net/home/technology/1625/conversation-with-memetracker-developer-kevin-burton

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

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
So, who are you?

Kevin Burton - TailRank
My name is Kevin Burton, I work with TailRank, I started about a year ago.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Yeah, do you call TailRank a 'Memetracker.' I don't know. Actually I call it that but...

Kevin Burton - TailRank
Yeah, it's definitely a 'Memetracker.'

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Or a news page or a...

Kevin Burton - TailRank
Something like that, yeah. An Aggregator.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Yeah, why did you start it? You compete with TechMeme, which came out a little good, did TechMeme come out first or did...?

Kevin Burton - TailRank
I think we were working on it, it was like stored in like Alpha mode and then TechMeme came out in like a month-and-a-half or something before we did, and I think Digg probably came out two months before that.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
You track News and Tech and what else?

Kevin Burton - TailRank
We track out Tech, Politics and Entertainment. Now, we're probably entering a few more here shortly.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Okay. How do you pick stuff that goes on each of those pages? How does the algorithm work?

Kevin Burton - TailRank
We have about 150,000 blogs in our Index.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
So, that's different than TechMeme because they only have a couple of thousand blogs, right.

Kevin Burton - TailRank
Yeah, I think a few thousand, and actually we're trying to expand to half a million, soon. So, that might be in the next release. But, we index them all once an hour and we try to look for conversations like the top story was that Jason Calcanis, who's leading very well today. So, about 200 people or something we're talking about that he is Mr. Famous now and that is like a top story, right now within TailRank.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Right, what got you into this? What got you interested in that?

Kevin Burton - TailRank
Actually, well, I'm interested in Reputation Systems in general, but the thing that really drove me is politics. I think that the political spectrum in United Sates is really unbalanced and we have, Mainstream Media Newspapers tend to maintain lack of bias by just having no opinion, which I think is wrong-headed. Then you've Fox News, which is just ultra-right-wing. Well, not maybe ultra-right-wing, but they're definitely right wing. So, the great thing I like about TailRank is that on the political side of the site, we actually go back and forth between left and right where one day like Mark Foley was harassing interns and that all our liberal bloggers will talk about that, and then the next day, something will happen and although Right Wing bloggers will start going on after the left.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
We should explain by the way, we're in the Palace Hotel, which is where the Web 2.0 Summit happened last week, right. We're just meeting here. Why are we meeting here? What's cool about the Palace Hotel?

Kevin Burton - TailRank
That's quite. I figured it would be quite.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
It's not that quite, but it's palatial. I like the Palace Hotel.

Kevin Burton - TailRank
It is nice hotel. I thought it'll be more quite, but apparently something going on today. So, but it's not too bad.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Yeah. How often does your algorithm go through those? How many blogs again did you say?

Kevin Burton - TailRank
150,000.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Does it go through all of them, every time it goes through the blogs or...?

Kevin Burton - TailRank
Yeah, we go, yeah.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
...or they have a set that you go through more often?

Kevin Burton - TailRank
Well, we have a -- we go through all 150,000 once per hour, but there are certain blogs who actually benefit, boost a little bit more. Like one way to game TailRank if you will, is to actually be a good blogger and blog and so as I get on the front page of TailRank, like you actually do really well because you'll break and participate in Memes, and you'll be like on the front page. So, we actually...

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
So, what is a Meme?

Kevin Burton - TailRank
A Meme is like a concept or a topic of conversation like the Mark Foley scandal, right. Everybody knows what that is, I can explain it within two or three words and when I say that a lot of knowledge goes just by using these two or three words. So, that's kind of a Meme in my concept. Until the way TailRank work is, it tries to identify those and sort of promote them to the top. It tracks them if you will, which is like people are calling them Memetrackers.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Now, if somebody started doing a new blog this morning, could they get into TailRank on their first day or...?

Kevin Burton - TailRank
Probably not right now. They would have to get a story that was on the front page of the TailRank.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
So, how do you do that? How does that happen?

Kevin Burton - TailRank
You can just get lots of bloggers to -- like a lot of bloggers like, I think Tom Raftery got Index in TailRank for first time I think because of the Web 2.0 copyright Meme.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
So, a lot of bloggers that are already in your system, linked to him...

Kevin Burton - TailRank
Linked to him, and then we go, okay well, if Scoble vouches for them and TechCrunch vouches for him and Winer vouches for him; we should be proud to put him in our Index. So, we to go automatically add them. We're actually working on it's part of our expansion in this next release an algorithm automatically tries to add more and more Web blogs. So, it would be more aggressive expansion.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Now, one of the negative things that people are saying about Memetrackers, particularly your competition is that there are leaders because they only have like you have a 150,000 blogs, so you're leaders because you're keeping out the others, six million or sixty million or whatever there is, but suppose they have a voice too or should have a voice...

Kevin Burton - TailRank
Yeah, I don't think we're trying to be a leadist. I think, what we're trying to basically do is -- our index is right now a 150,000 blogs, we're bigger than most of our competitors and we're actually going to expanding that. I think it's a meritocracy, I think the more blogs we add, the better our results are going to be. So, it's not -- it's just basically a capacity constraint, right now. So, we want to add them, we want to be more of a meritocracy.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
But, on the prose side of that whole argument is, these Memetrackers don't have spams and you're really a filter for me. If I only have five minutes to read blogs, I don't want to go through 300 or 150,000 feeds, right and then try to keep up with that.

Kevin Burton - TailRank
Yeah, totally.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Because you can't keep up with a 150,000 feeds...

Kevin Burton - TailRank
I know.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
There's no way you can do it manually.

Kevin Burton - TailRank
I can't.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
But you can go to one place and see what the filter had said that is important, right.

Kevin Burton - TailRank
I think I really tagged what line was VB Blog so, you don't have to, basically, which I think is okay. But yeah, we're trying to be more open and less a leadist.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Is there another variable that you think you could study other than linking because Digg studies Velocity, right?

Kevin Burton - TailRank
We do Velocity as well, actually. Yeah, if a story breaks out really quickly like every once a while on TailRank, you'll see the stories and it shows you the number of links in that cluster, to that meme and the top one might be fifty links and the second one might be 300 links and you're like, well, why is that happening? Because the top story has a greater velocity like it just broke and a lot of people are blogging about it.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Is there anyway to see the velocity graphically or...?

Kevin Burton - TailRank
Which we might incorporate into the UI. So, you can actually see how quickly... because I think some bloggers actually one of the feedback we had was that some bloggers may want to look at the velocity, so they can jump in on it and start adding their comment, their commentary.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Yeah. Well, I met some guy who's building a system like yours but not for public consumption, but for stock traders because they could track new stories. If you could see velocity of story before it hit the front page of the Memetrackers or even - certainly before it hit the Mainstream News, you can make stock trades based on what was being discussed.

Kevin Burton - TailRank
It's a good point, maybe I should be a Revenue Model. You should update.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
What is your revenue model as you mention?

Kevin Burton - TailRank
Revenue models going to be selling ads. we actually make most of our money by licensing our Crawl Technology to other companies.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Really, I didn't know that. So, why would another company want to buy your Crawl Technology?

Kevin Burton - TailRank
Because they don't want to write a crawler, that's the main reason. They need blog content, so they don't want have to write...

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
But for the 15 people out there, who don't know what a Crawler is, what is a Crawler?

Kevin Burton - TailRank
Well, a Crawler is like a piece of technology. Google has a crawler, for example, they need to index all the Websites to build their Index. So, a Crawler goes through all these -- this list of Websites and just indexes all the content, and so we have one that indexes our 150,000 and the Spam Link, for example, you've mentioned Spam Prevention, we have no Spam Prevention. We do all the compression, all the RSS stuff, my last company was an RSS Company.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Yeah, you started Rojo.

Kevin Burton - TailRank
Rojo, yeah, yeah. So, I'm familiar with writing crawlers and so, our's are pretty -- I think our crawler only took about a month to develop.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Since you write crawlers, didn't Google and Microsoft and Yahoo! just announce a standard for crawlers?

Kevin Burton - TailRank
Yes, Sitemaps.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Sitemaps?

Kevin Burton - TailRank
Not necessarily standard for crawlers, but to get your content into the index at a more frequent interval.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
What does that mean? Does that mean anything for your company?

Kevin Burton - TailRank
It does, because someone like TailRank gets indexing faster, can get their content into TailRank, into Google faster. So, I think it's good idea, especially considering that blog search is sort of hasn't really taken off and I don't think a lot of the mass market is using Blog Search like Technorati and Feedster, Google Blog Search. So, this way they can...

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Yes, it doesn't work, I'll be honest. You go to blog search engines and search on the word 'Trauma' or 'Trucky' or 'Plumbing' or basically any topic that you want and you get a lot of spam or you get a lot of stuff that looks like spam. It might be a legitimate blog post, but it's not a tracker that -- I'm looking for trackers, right. So, then I go back to Google, to the main Google, not to the Blog Search Google and I find it very unsatisfying and very hard to tell other people how to use. As you spoke for tracking, what somebody says about you overtime...

Kevin Burton - TailRank
True. For vanity searches or something like that...

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Yeah, or a company or your competitor would not, but it's really hard to go in there as a first time experience and get a useful set of blogs right away. Technorati has tried by turning on authority features, which are popularity features really, but it's still unsatisfactory.

Kevin Burton - TailRank
I think that major problem is that their index size, specifically with Technorati we have 57 million blogs and I think I've done the math I think, rough, there are only four million blogs.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
How did you arrive to that figure?

Kevin Burton - TailRank
I'll send you the URL, but I would...

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
I saw the URL, but I want you to tell me that why you think there's really only four million bloggers?

Kevin Burton - TailRank
Because if you look at Technorati's growth, it's sort of a -- for the camera it's sort of exponential like this, right. But their posting frequency, number of posts per day is linear, right. So, if you divide the number of blogs by the number of posts per day, you get to see that active blog numbers are actually tapering off and actually falling.

So, that means the majority of their index doesn't post on a regular basis. So, if you checked around some numbers like, half the index posts at it already equalled the number of blog posts, you need blogs that post once per week or once every two weeks at least, and if you do all the numbers and cracking all down, the basic comes out to four million blogs are active and actually contributing to the post per day interval on Technorati. So, four million is a lot smaller than 57. So, I think in the blog search problem...

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
That getting you into a lot of trouble because I tried making this point with Live Spaces. I went to Live Spaces and elected 200 and 300 blogs randomly chosen.

Kevin Burton - TailRank
Yeah, Yeah.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
I could only find one or two that actually had a content on it as a blog. I mean some of them had photos and other things, but -- and some of them had spam and...

Kevin Burton - TailRank
So, I think there's a name for this.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
But even that if there was one out of -- or two out of two hundred that I could find that actually had what I would call Content you know some words...

Kevin Burton - TailRank
I think there's a name for this. It's like there's a Short-head; there's the Long tail and then there's like the No tail, right? Whether its content with no one reads it, right. I think that's what Technorati indexes, they index a lot of blogs with -- that no one read.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Or no one's posting to?

Kevin Burton - TailRank
Yeah, right. So, they're counting up in their index is 57 million, right. So, the question is, what percentage, I think it's a large percentage. I think it's probably like somewhere a significant jump, way north four million, so...

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Interesting, Wow!

Kevin Burton - TailRank
I mean, don't just credit that, I think in some situations Technorati, especially for the Link Cosmos feature. If anybody links to you, even if nobody reads them, you might want to get to see their feedback. Like, if someone links to this show and there are only as three or four readers, you might want to hear what they say. But...

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Yeah. Well, there are a lot of blogs out there that were done at one time and stopped or the guy does one post every three months. I guess you wouldn't count that as an active blog.

Kevin Burton - TailRank
We don't -- we wouldn't index that. That's it. The major problem we're trying to solve is we want to take the Blogosphere and make it more acceptable for mainstream consumers because from the mainstream perspective, even if you say, there are four million blogs -- that's four million blogs -- that's four million Websites they have to read, they have to understand, but most people, they don't want to think about blogs. This is like, I'm interested in technology or I'm interested in gossip, and I want a Website that shows me what the blogosphere is talking about and that's what I think TailRank does. We make blogs successful for more mainstream consumers.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
What's your traffic like, in terms of visitors to your site, is it...?

Kevin Burton - TailRank
We get about, I think 450,000 per month.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
How fast is it growing?

Kevin Burton - TailRank
We're going pretty good. I think overall it's about 50%, 60%, 70% growth per month

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
That's pretty good.

Kevin Burton - TailRank
Yeah.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
So, lots of people are linking to TailRank and that's where you're getting your traffic from.

Kevin Burton - TailRank
Just natural growth. Yeah.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Where do you find your best traffic came from?

Kevin Burton - TailRank
Actually, PopUrls does a pretty good job of driving traffic.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
PopUrls?

Kevin Burton - TailRank
Yeah.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Okay.

Kevin Burton - TailRank
As part as of a number one referral or actually one of their --they actually do a pretty good job of drawing traffic.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Interesting.

Kevin Burton - TailRank
So, and StumbleUpon does pretty good job too.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Who does?

Kevin Burton - TailRank
StumbleUpon.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Oh Yeah, I'm getting a lot of traffic lately from them.

Kevin Burton - TailRank
Yeah, thinking about I put a Stumble button on TailRank. So, if someone likes a story they can quickly. So, then I got this app to see the conversion of that, though and whether or not it actually (Inaudible). So, you can make these changes, but if they don't ever do anything, what's the point.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Yeah. What's the biggest mistake you made in doing TailRank?

Kevin Burton - TailRank
That's a good question. Not bringing in design from earlier on.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Interesting, but why?

Kevin Burton - TailRank
People really liked that design and I think part of our more recent driving growth, I'm hearing people -- consistently, since our 2.0 release, that they're migrating from Digg to TailRank and they're migrating from Techni into TailRank, and they're really loving it. I think it was the user interface, so I think if we would have had a user interface refresher earlier, I think that could've helped our (Inaudible).

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Well I love seeing a little thumb nails.

Kevin Burton - TailRank
Yeah, cool.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
It helps you visualize who the...

Kevin Burton - TailRank
Who the blogger is, yeah. as you can see TechCrunch, you can visualize that as being TechCrunch. Or you can visual that as being Scobelizer. I think -- yeah, I really like that.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Yeah. What's the best thing you did?

Kevin Burton - TailRank
Putting our research and development into our cluster. So, that we have additional headroom into the future and we don't like stumble and fall upon ourselves by like scalability of the site.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Tell me a little bit about the architecture of site -- how did you build it, what's involved?

Kevin Burton - TailRank
We've sort of the Google philosophy of using really ultra cheap computers and systems that can fail at given point in time. So, I think one of the major mistakes that people make is that we have one server. We actually have our system, our backend design and so the majority of our sites can fail and still operational; we actually kind of lose like 50% of our cluster and we'll still be online and working. We actually have eight robots, they act all execute in parallel. If any of them die, doesn't matter because we have additional load that can take over and our databases can fail and that's actually I was in Thailand for a month finishing up that work.

Robert Scoble -- ScobleShow
So why did you go to Thailand to finish up your code?

Kevin Burton - TailRank
Because I needed, I needed to concentrate, I needed to concentrate and there is this (Voice Overlap).

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
(Voice Overlap) go to outside this work to echo chamber?

Kevin Burton - TailRank
Yeah, and there is so many -- it's like everybody is inviting you to parties, and you're going to party all the time, you go ahead and have the all the free alcohol and stuff and its fun, but I've needed to concentrate. So, I just went to Thailand and it's was in Kukait for a month, it was great, I got a lot of work done, actually MySQL just licensed the code we designed, so they just licensed that code and they're going to build into MySQL.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Really?

Kevin Burton - TailRank
Yeah. So it's just clustering technology, so that way you can -- a database can actually physically die and it transparently redirects to the other databases and the whole site keeps online and functional.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
What else would you like people to know about TailRank?

Kevin Burton - TailRank
Let's see, we're doing a 2.1, big release there, so I think its like 30 days, I'm really excited about that, it's a beautiful stuff. (Voice Overlap).I'm not going to say this yet.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
You're not, come on (Inaudible) come at ScobleShow.

Kevin Burton - TailRank
Maybe off the record, maybe off the record, more blogs. I've already said that, we've really want to index more blogs. I think we want to be metacritic and I also want the ability, you want a new blog, releases like we've noticed that some bloggers they're already be mainstream A List mail us bloggers and they'll get a new blog and we would have to mainly add that right now, or they would have to get a mean indexed already, but we want to index and detect these types of patterns faster.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Are you going to build our artificial intelligence system where the system itself can learn and that there is a new blog that came out that's the (Voice Overlap) bad quality.

Kevin Burton - TailRank
It wouldn't call artificial intelligence but that's basically what it does, it would locate linking patterns and so forth and determine that blogs are (Inaudible) being indexed.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Now, can not be gained by, let's say, I had $1 thousand in my pocket I could go to a Paper post and, say, "Hey I pay five bucks for everybody to link to this post virtually it blog (Voice Overlap).

Kevin Burton - TailRank
Yeah, that's a bit. Yeah. I think the term for that is astroturfing, excellent.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Is that?

Kevin Burton - TailRank
Yeah. How sploggers and spammers, I actually think the term for a people like PaperPost and ReviewMe is astroturfers and if I detect people astroturfing like selling posts, and selling links, I might end up blocking certain sites.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
How was our camera? I'm looking good. We got Adam from RockyMountain News, you are RockyMountain News, right?

Speaker
Fred. Fred I'm sorry, from RockyMountain Voices.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Rocky Mountain, see you then.

Speaker
Its (Inaudible) minutes.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Too much drinking.

Kevin Burton - TailRank
There we go.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Too much drinking with _Fred from RockyMountainVoices is running (Inaudible), so I appreciate that. Since you're one of those guys in the center of the whole world and are algorithms are watching the whole world what trends are you seeing . You were talking to me before camera, was your excepting the bubble to burst, but where does that insight come from?

Kevin Burton - TailRank
Well, I don't know if it's related to the TailRank, but I do feel that a lot of startups which they're interesting technologies and interesting products, they're taking away too much money for and actually my (Voice Overlap).

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
How much then did you take?

Kevin Burton - TailRank
We haven't taken any money.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
What?

Kevin Burton - TailRank
We're fully self funded.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
How do you pay for your bills?

Kevin Burton - TailRank
I know this is going to sound shocking. We're actually profitable, we actually have revenue.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Well if didn't take any money how much revenue do you get after (Inaudible) 450,000 pages.

Kevin Burton - TailRank
I think that, it's actually our note that 450,000 uniques.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Uniques.

Kevin Burton - TailRank
So our pages are much, are well worth 450,000 but oh your question was -- oh yeah, we like to record other technology, other companies, we make our revenue that way. So, but we haven't needed to and I think I'd see a lot of technologies, or a lot of companies taking a huged Sujey and I mean I think for some people we see can be great and taking a series that can be a good thing, but yeah I think we're definitely doing the Web 1.0 mistakes and I think some people should really stop, cut it out. Before it get burst 2.0.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
But you can take the money while its there right.

Kevin Burton - TailRank
Burst 2.0, I don't know about that, I don't know about that.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
So, you have no cash or no investment?

Kevin Burton - TailRank
External investment, yeah.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
So, you've boot-strapped it completely yourself?

Kevin Burton - TailRank
We boot-strapped yup.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
That's amazing.

Kevin Burton - TailRank
Yeah, I feel proud of that.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
I'm hearing that (Inaudible) what was the company, (Inaudible) company compact.

Kevin Burton - TailRank
Alright.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
...so he launched his whole company without spending a dollar. He went further (Inaudible) you said that no investment and no spending but you bought the (Voice Overlap).

Kevin Burton - TailRank
Okay, it has the factor in your salary at least in hardware, right. So it's a little bit so I guess you could save it on the lean side, which is fine I mean, you can actually we actually use a company called ServerBeach and if you send me an email, I can get you a ...

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
ServerBeach?

Kevin Burton - TailRank
ServerBeach, I can get you rebate if you send me an email, but they do a pretty good job like we our boxes, so we haven't had to do capital. There's like a whole bunch of startup packs, so mething about starting a blog or startup hacks.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
That's a great idea. So would some of the (Inaudible) that...

Kevin Burton - TailRank
Don't get an office if you don't need it like we can afford an office but right now we're...

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
So that's why we are in Palace Hotel?

Kevin Burton - TailRank
Yeah, exactly, it's one of the reasons, yeah

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Yeah now you know what are my hacks, I don't have a studio.

Kevin Burton - TailRank
There we go. Sweet. well yeah, you should go to other offices.

RobertScoble - TailRank
All my money gone into a camera.

Kevin Burton - TailRank
Nice.

RobertScoble - TailRank
Buy a nice camera that's you've got to have some treats although...

Kevin Burton - TailRank
A lot of people hang out and like Richard Roster has a bunch of starups all the time, amateur Rosters, right in the mission they have great coffee too. And so why would you want to necessarily throw on the capital, don't buy your servers because if you can rent them, lets see maybe trade, you can trade services with other people, instead of getting a VC if you need talent you can always bring an advisory board that's a good hack too, instead of having to bringing VC, I mean VCs can often bring an external talent but you don't need to necessarily raise money to get that talent.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Well, they are also really, the good ones are awesome networkers.

Kevin Burton - TailRank
That's true.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Have the blog helps you with the network.

Kevin Burton - TailRank
Yeah. Have a blog that's a good advice, specially for a good bloggers especially you, you're pretty (Inaudible).

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Well. What else do we talk about? I mean what other trends are you noticing? What do you expect the blogsphere to, people ask me that all the time, but I have a feeling you are building more the blogsphere that's going to come in the next year or so?

Kevin Burton - TailRank
I think, I don't know, I think it's going to stabilize, how about you?

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Well, I'm noticing that fewer new voices are coming in or maybe fewer new voices that are getting discovered, at least in my world because it's just harder at to pay attention anybody I'm being so snowed under now.

Kevin Burton - TailRank
Well, TechCrunch came on nowhere.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Yeah, but that was a year and a half ago and it wasn't formulated, now the tech world is formulated so now you have to do some thing crazy, you'll get noticed.

Kevin Burton - TailRank
Like BalleyWay.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
I still believe if you could get noticed but you have to do, yeah I'm Ballyway, or do a company that does something interesting and interesting is getting the bar is going up, Second Life, or like.com , like.com took a lot of the thunder away from Web (Inaudible) a week ago and but he had how many PhDs?

Kevin Burton - TailRank
I know. I know. I know a lot tasks and where the servers are expensive.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
(Voice Overlap) A lot of servers and a lot of PhDs doing something interesting and to get attention that shows you the bar is pretty high right now to get the world to pay attention to you.

Kevin Burton - TailRank
Well, there's one way to -- I mean you can throw cash and PhDs the problem, but there's people that have this clever ideas every once in a while that I don't really that like, "Oh yeah that's kind of obvious," like Rocketboom was a pretty simple idea we'll higher talented actress to act as a talent and then we'll right a script for her and then we will do a video podcast. I mean that doesn't require bunch of Ph.Ds it doesn't require $17 million investment, they're doing pretty good so that was a year ago, still year-and-a-half ago.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Yeah. One of the reasons I quit Microsoft is because of that. Well I saw there the traffic numbers gone I go and so I said, "Hey it's time to go out and play and try to do this thing.

Kevin Burton - TailRank
Yeah, how the ScobleShow's traffic?

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
It's going nuts.

Kevin Burton - TailRank
Nice, Okay.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
If the traffic - if their turn line says the same I will catch Rocketboom in about six months.

Kevin Burton - TailRank
Oh, that's silly. Oh you've a Rocketboom, oh, you're like this. Rocketboom.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
I am only two months old so the tariff numbers are going great but it will tail up to that...

Kevin Burton - TailRank
Yeah, it started of sustain.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
It's hard to build the audience, you've seen that it's hard to get attention right now and especially in tech blogsphere, there is so much competition for your eyeball and you'll certainly see that watching TailRank, you see 100s of stories come to there and it's hardly get people's attention.

Kevin Burton - TailRank
Yeah, there are really very few stories that are actually really fundamentally break up. I think may be there is like four or five a week that are just like the Mark Foley thing, what is the Australian -- I forget his name, the Australian guy with that attacked by the stringray, Steve Irwin, when Steve Irwin died that was a major big story.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Yeah, well he was the world wide celebrity. Are you studying differences in different parts of the world, for instance, are you building at TailRank for China or TailRank for Iran or?

Kevin Burton - TailRank
(Inaudible) the question is, is whether or not their blogs -- I think they probably are, I think if there is going to be anymore growth in the blogsphere its probably be in Japan, China or Iran because it's not sustained. In United States we've proven that it's a good medium, right. I mean there's like the second Ashlon of people that are extremely talented, but for some reason they haven't been identified by mainstream media and this is like sort of allows them to bypass the gates, like there's no gate preventing them from doing something and in China, in Japan although that still growing, but its funny because TailRank in China I would guess, so squashed, so fast because everything we would break would be like in politics for example, we would break stories and the government would be like, "You can't write that, you can't write that," and I think entering China would probably be a bad idea, at least right now, now I am not sure if want to had censorship.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Well it's been a fun hour. Are we going to get a demo of it too?

Kevin Burton - TailRank
You want the demo? We can do demo.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Yeah, we'll do you demo on it, (Inaudible) a little bit I always ask people to show me what they're working on. Give me a run through so somebody can watch it.

Kevin Burton - TailRank
Yeah, I've seen the demos in the ScobleShow.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Yeah. Well thanks.

Kevin Burton - TailRank
Great, thank you.

Robert Burton - TailRank
It was a fun.

Copyright ©2006 PodTech.net. All rights reserved. Privacy policy