When TailRank first launched, I jumped on board and signed up, uploading my OPML. I questioned why I did so at the time, since it didn't give me anything.

Well, they've redesigned and obviously added some new features, and the end result: It rocks!

Why? Short version: it shows what's interesting to your network. Long version: you can filter by your subscriptions and see what the blogs in your network are linking to. But it goes beyond that because you can then filter further by the number of links. I'm not sure what the appropriate number for me is, but I'm pretty sure it's not the default of two - with over 700 subscriptions, finding two posts that link to the same thing is pretty common. Now, if I up that number to 10 or 15, then I start to get a pretty good look at what's important to my network. This is exactly what I talked about doing using the Newsgator API.

Now, here's how this could be better and more useful for me. First, I imported my Newsgator OPML file, but I am constantly updating that with new subscriptions and (now that FeedDemon makes it easy to find dead feeds) removing old feeds. It would be nice if I could tell TailRank to remember my information and pull down my updated subscriptions - it doesn't have to be every time I access the feed or page, but once a week or even once a month would be nice. Keep the subscription list relatively accurate. Second, show me who in my network is linking to it. If there's 17 links from my subscription list, I'd like to know who they are, as well as who else in the blogosphere is linking to it. Or, let me upload multiple OPMLs and base feeds based on subsets of my list.

Still, the more I use TailRank, the more I like it.

One note: I tried to subscribe to my 10 link personal filter, and got errors. The feed link points to:

http://rss.tailrank.com/posts/filter?min_ranking=10/handle/RossCode

but that link doesn't work. Until the issue is resolved, you can fix it by moving the /handle/RossCode to right after filter, like so:

http://rss.tailrank.com/posts/filter/handle/RossCode?min_ranking=10

Obviously, if you're using for your own feeds, substitute RossCode with your own TailRank ID.

Technorati Tags: TailRank | OPML