Tailrank.com is a site that provides a feed of content on the World Wide Web that's being discussed across the blogosphere. The site continuously scans blogs that have been registered with it, and composes an index of "top stories" that have been cited by the various blogs it has scanned.

The focus of the site is the news items themselves, but users are also able to see snippets of the various blog citations that made the story popular.

The list of top stories changes over time; newer items are given a higher score than older items, and more popular items are given a higher score than less popular items. Items high on the list tend to be articles or posts that have triggered a lot of blog activity over the last day or so.

Because the site's index allows one to follow the spread of ideas from blog to blog, it can be thought of a memetracker. It's the closest thing to a modern equivalent of blogdex, which has been shut down.

One major problem with Tailrank is the fact that they ignore robots.txt files which means it will index any and all content it can find whether you wish it to index this content or not. This includes heavy polling of dynamic links that create database load.

Media attention

"Tailrank - A Tool for the Long Tail", September 21, 2005, TechCrunch

"TailRank is Looking Good", January 17, 2006, TechCrunch

"Conversation with Memetracker developer Kevin Burton", December 8, 2006, PodTech.net