Tailrank, the service that tracks blog buzz, launched a 2.0 version today after 6 months of development. Aside from a slicker interface, Kevin Burton et al have improved their ranking algorithms. They've also added an archive view to track past stories, and a new category for entertainment. What's more, you can track stories via RSS or instant messenger, receiving alerts as stories develop. Another neat feature: you can now expand and collapse stories to make the page easier to scan.
The results do seem better: in the technology category, Tailrank is delivering very similar results to the geek-favorite Techmeme, with enough variety to make it worthwhile checking both services. And Tailrank has long provided a personalized view called "My Tail", something that other services have decided not to offer.
With the volume of news and blog content becoming overwhelming, these services (aka memetrackers) and human-powered filters like Digg serve a very necessary purpose. Newspapers will no doubt want to have versions on their own sites, while companies could use them to track the buzz around certain markets. It could, however, end up being like the RSS reader market: a few of the top services get acquired, while the rest drift into obscurity. Tailrank will have to hope it's in the former category - personally, I'm undecided about whether they'll make it.
New Launch From Megite
In related news, rival memetracker Megite launched a new version over the weekend, complete with a better discovery algorithm, better clustering, more categories and a so-called "river of news" view. The results seem good, but I don't find them as compelling as those on Techmeme. They do, however, support many more categories than rival services - like health, sports and finance. Since bloggers in these categories seem to post and link less frequently, however, there's less action in these sections.
[img src="" caption="" credit="" alt=""]