Hey blogger, follow that meme
I'm intriqued by a service called Tailrank - it's a memetracker that spiders more than one hundred thousand blogs (presumably chosen based on Technorati rank, but I don't see any details about this at their site) and publishes well-organized, comprehensive threads that track the spread of the hottest blogosphere topics for any given day. There are other, better established memetrackers (most notably Techmeme, but also Chuquet, Megite, and some others), but I find Tailrank's organizing principles to be really intuitive and, to me, it just looks a whole lot prettier.
Here is their page for yesterday's Sony PSP flog meme.
You see all of the blog posts they have discovered about the topic, presented in more-or-less chronological order, making it easy to follow the spread of the meme from start to finish. In this example, you can see that Adrants broke the news, got picked up by AdFreak, a few of us hopped in (I'm in the #5 position), Logic+Emotion picked it up from me, etc.
You can also subscribe to a topical feed if you want to keep on top of an ongoing meme, as it happens. Cool way for any company to keep track of positive or negative threads once something hits the blogosphere.
They have a bunch of advanced tools, most of which I haven't played with yet - you can track meme-participation for specific blogs (I did try this one out and it returned no results for my blog, even though I've been included in several Tailrank threads so far), produce a snapshot of hot topics for any given date, and if you are a Tailrank subscriber (free, but you don't even need to subscribe to use most of their tools) you can input a list of your favorite blogs and they will recommend additional blogs you might also like.
Just using the basic memetracking tool, I've found it easier to follow widely distributed conversations (taking place across many many blogs) and have discovered some great marketing blogs I hadn't previously known about.
The social media sphere has gotten so vast that it can sometimes be a daunting task to find quality content on a topic of interest and track that topic across multiple sources to get a sense of the various perspectives (dissenting views, most commonly held opinions, etc.) Smart tools that serve as filters are important now, and will only become more important over time (especially if we are looking for widespread consumer adoption (meaning consumption, not just creation) of blogs.
Check out Tailrank and let me know if you agree.
