Kevin Burton at Feedblog announces that Tailrank is in public beta, so get over there and test it already!! Tailrank is "a personalized recommendation engine where you and your contacts control the ranking!" A new way of organising, searching and navigating the blogosphere.

The key word here is beta. This isn't a Google-style beta. This isn't a Web 2.0-style beta. This is the old school definition of beta where we need feedback from the community to make a better product. Constructive criticism only please!

In particular you're encouraged to import your subs with OPML, until the manual add and automated crawler go live in the near future. Then once you have your acct, and you're all signed in, you can start reviewing material and ranking what you see:

TailRank works by analysing the sources you're interested in (from both TailRank members and from weblogs). It is from this list that we can make personal recommendations. All you have to do is tell TailRank what you're interested in.

This can be done by:

1. Using import weblogs to quickly import a set of blogs.
2. Sharing and tagging a weblog with our weblog ranking system
3. Sharing and tagging a person with our people ranking system

The more weblogs or people you share the smarter TailRank will become!

Done and done. Best of luck with it, Kevin!!

And in an, "oh, hey, well we must be doing something right" moment, I'm interested to see that Freshblog was added this morning by someone else!! Thanks for the vote of confidence!!

Filed in: webtech, blogtech, search