Minority Rapport

TailRank Podcast

This week Doug and I had a chance to speak with Kevin Burton, CEO of the Tailrank "social news recommendation system and collaborative filter."  TailRank combines elements you might recognize from RSS Aggregation, Google News and del.icio.us-style Social Tagging.  Kevin spoke about his experience launching the system's first public beta this past Tuesday and about the ways he tries to understand how many users have tried TailRank so far (between 600 and 4,000 depending on how you look at it).  We spoke more generally about fads in Web 2.0, and opportunities for further innovation.

Kevin mentioned offline that he is pursuing a first round of angel funding, and furthermore that he'd like to supplement those funds with advertising revenue from a syndicated batch of AdSense code.

Feed technologies and collaborative filtering both seem explosively powerful to me, although the next round of innovation will have to move far beyond RSS aggregation.  As Kevin has emphasized, the core technologies involved in gathering feeds are increasingly accessible.  Users and traffic, now as always, will make the difference as the most powerful collaborative platforms must be those powered by the largest resovoir of implicit knowledge.  It's exciting to see new innovations such as Kevin's, then, that leverage the best of disparate social media concepts.

Kevin has thought a great deal about feed technologies, having authored the NewsMonster RSS aggregator and co-founded Rojo Networks.  His FeedBlog is an excellent read for those who would like to learn more.  Doug and I certainly hope Kevin will stop back in future and let us know how things are progressing.  In the meantime, however, you can check out the podcast by clicking here (MP3, 5.6MB) .

++UPDATE: From Kevin's blog: "Actually, I think I mentioned that I was "pursuing" an angel round. If any VCs or Angels are reading my blog please feel free to send me an email... :)"  Apologies, Kevin.  My mistake.  The post has been corrected.

Moving ahead of the curve: Transitioning our blog’s focus from social software to online media

It has been far too long since I last posted on this blog given I would like to post once a week. Jon and I have been discussing repositioning the blog to focus on new areas. I think that is absolutely necessary. Rather than take a role as a blog dedicated to keeping you up to date on the latest MySpace traffic numbers, I am more inclined to try to guess what people will be doing in the future than reporting on what is happening now.  That means looking at spaces with more unanswered questions. To the point, social networks by themselves are no longer compelling; what is compelling is what you do with or enable for groups of people, whether those people are or are not explicitly "friends" in the online social network sense of the word.   To that end, I want to learn more about services such as iMeem that are enabling and facilitating user-empowerment to the extent useful content is created.  But that is just the start.

Citizen journalism, personalization and online media -- both including stalwarts like the NY Times and popular vlogs like RocketBoom -- offer up many possibilities, including going to a space of digital content expansion past the typed word. Questions about the future of blog networks as acquisition targets by big media are important; those acquisitions beg the question, can bloggers really be acquired? I ask that because even if a major company lets a blog network operate separately, they still face influences that could pervert their perspectives that they otherwise would not experience by being totally independent. The result is the integrity of and thus the usefulness of those blog posts go down. But that is just my speculation. It remains to be seen how it will really play out, but I think Battelle is right.  We await more on his Federated Media start-up.

Knowing what best to do with all this blog content is still far from resolved. TailRank, Findory, Sphere and Memeorandum come to mind. I want to explore amateur video. Google Video and Yahoo Video are players in video search.  YouTube and OurMedia look at the task a bit differently. Browsing through YouTube, even the highest ranked content seems to lack a certain level of resolution quality that could be solved by improving video-camera technologies. Then things can really change: what happens when a camera phone can store 10 hours of video of the same quality as you get from premium handheld video recorders? A lot. This has been buzzed about for over a year, and we are still a ways off from seeing a major impact. At the same time, we see big media like Warner through AOL Television trying to unlock the value of their content over the long tail. Stay tuned as we transition from social networks to online media and beyond.