I talk about Memeorandum all the time, and it’s no secret that I love it. I’ve talked about Chuquet and Megite a few times, including about the Newsome.Org personalized version of Megite.

But tonight it’s time to talk about Tailrank, the other major player in the meme tracker game. I’ve had good things to say about Tailrank before, here and here.

It’s a daily read for me, so let’s take a closer look.

Earlier this week I talked to Tailrank founder Kevin Burton about the site and his upcoming plans for it.

The first thing that jumps out at me about Tailrank, and something that differentiates it from other meme trackers, are the screen grabs. I like the little screengrabs beside the lead articles. It gives me a sense of the place where the article comes from and on occasion it leads me back to that site to check out the design and/or see what else the writer has to say.

Kevin told me that the plan is for Tailrank to display a screengrab for most if not all the blogs that get listed. Earlier this week some screengrabs weren’t showing up, but tonight most of the blogs on the front page have a screengrab. Kevin and I didn’t talk about this, but some of the old media sites may not permit screengrabs, so that may be why some sites don’t have them.

I think the screengrabs are a nice touch.

The other thing that jumps out at me is that Tailrank is more broadly focused than some of the other meme trackers and does not have categories- yet.

Kevin tells me that some sort of category feature is coming, and pretty soon.

On the one hand, I like the “everything in one place” aspect of Tailrank because I see things I wouldn’t otherwise see, like this story about Greenland’s melting glaciers. On the other hand, except for when Cheney whacks somebody like he did this week, I am completely uninterested in politics. So I am in favor of some sort of category option.

I would love to see multiple options: all categories, one category or choose your categories. That would be tres cool (I would pick tech, music and whatever else grabs me; I would not pick politics, at least not until Cheney shoots somebody else).

I also asked Kevin if Tailrank had any plans to do any sort of personalization filtering, like Megite is experimenting with now. Kevin told me that when Tailrank launched it had some personalization features- I didn’t know that. No specific details yet about what’s forthcoming in this regard, but I believe Tailrank will come out with something new and innovative in this regard. As Kevin said, “stay tuned.”

The trick as others have pointed out is how to allow personalization without overburdening your servers. People feel differently about the value of and need for meme tracker personalization, but I think it’s a neat, though not mandatory, feature. Particularly if you are trying to build a mindshare. Stated another way, I don’t think Memeorandum needs it, but I think some sort of personalization is a worthwhile feature for those who want to close the gap between themselves and Memeorandum.

The other thing I have wondered about is how Tailrank picks the lead story and the order of the “inbound” stories, particularly on the link pages. Kevin tells me they are reworking the way links are displayed. Expect the links to have more of a threaded look in the future.

I’m glad to hear that, because the one thing I would change about Tailrank (other than getting Newsome.Org posts up there more) is the way the various links are displayed. It seems to me that there could be more information on the link pages. While I like the screengrabs, many of the posts on the link pages don’t have them and that wastes a lot of screen space. Even though I like the screengrabs on the link pages, I would gladly have them appear smaller or perhaps even disappear altogether in exchange for clustered links and more information that would make it easier to jump back and forth from the various linking blogs.

Members who sign in at Tailrank can submit, summarize and tag new stories, to see if they get legs (via tags from other users). If something gets tagged a lot, it moves up to the front page, sort of like Digg. I’m going to tag this story when I get done and see if I get more traction that I did with my Digg experiment (only 2 diggs, including mine). Members can also tag currently listed stories and edit summaries for existing stories (though it’s not clear to me exactly how the summary edit works). I admit that I haven’t really explored this feature much before tonight. I tagged the glacier story with “waterworld,” but I’m not sure why.

While I like the meme tracking functions of Tailrank, I’m not sure I know enough about the tagging and summary editing functions to fully understand how they can help me or other readers. Perhaps a tutorial would help. But these are features the other meme trackers don’t have, so it’s hard to criticize Tailrank for not fully describing them.

All in all, Tailrank is a cool and useful service that’s getting better all the time. It is one of the best places on the web to find interesting content and new blogs to read.

Social Computing to Change the World?

Charlene Li posts about a new Forrester report, which is only available to customers, so I have to either pay $299 or talk about it second hand, so I choose second hand.

According to the Executive Summary of the report:

Easy connections brought about by cheap devices, modular content, and shared computing resources are having a profound impact on our global economy and social structure. Individuals increasingly take cues from one another rather than from institutional sources like corporations, media outlets, religions, and political bodies. To thrive in an era of Social Computing, companies must abandon top-down management and communication tactics, weave communities into their products and services, use employees and partners as marketers, and become part of a living fabric of brand loyalists

I guess I’m not so sure about that. If I were going to write a Newsome.Org research report and sell it (probably for around $2.99) the executive summary might say something like this:

All sorts of new web 2.0 and social computing applications (including several thousand online calendars), some hip new wi-fi devices, and too much time on the computer are having a profound impact on the nerd quotient of the typical computer geek.

See, I am a computer geek too. And I’m totally into most of this stuff (well, except for the thousands of online calendars). But I work for a big company who works for and with a ton of other big companies. And other than Blackberries and the occasional corporate blog which substitutes for a press release page, I haven’t seen one indication that big business is aware of, interested in or affected by Web 2.0 or social computing. Heck most of these social computing applications violate corporate internet policies and/or are disabled by corporate firewalls designed to make people work and keep out the next computer virus. Colleges probably care, since a least a material part of their students are into MySpace, Facebook, etc. But I’ve never seen any evidence that the social computing movement affects big business.

So even though big business has rejected Instant Messaging, we expect it to embrace tagging? Fat chance.

I think most of this social computing hype is driven by an odd-couple confederacy comprised of computer nerds like me who can’t wait to get home and read their RSS feeds and the money making machinery that’s trying to monetize these new ideas the same way they monetized the old ideas. The only problem is that not every great idea or technological advance fits snugly into a business plan- at least not when part of that business plan is making money.

Most of this Web 2.0, social computing stuff is cool. But businesses don’t care about cool. They care about making money. So to get embraced by big business, all these applications are going to have to conclusively demonstrate exactly how they will help make more money. Efficiency is important, but it takes a lot of efficiency to get legs in corporate IT departments where most companies aren’t even using Windows XP yet. Using an old version of a word processor isn’t a concern until someone decides the new version will help make more money.

Stated another way, how are blogging and RSS and all the other wonders of social computing going to create more dollars for big business? Blogging is just online marketing to that small percentage of companies who know what a blog is. Maybe blogging is a little better and hipper, but it’s closer to an email vs. Instant Messaging thing than something financially relevant.

Again, I haven’t read the report, so it may have footnotes and data galore proving that I am wrong. But the Executive Summary reads to me like “101 Reasons Why You Should Hire Me to Gaze at My Navel.”

Now I Know Why I Didn’t Get into Harvard

Contrast the Forrester report to Nick Carr’s take today about Web 2.0, which is more than a little about social computing:

I’ve become convinced that we’re building a machine that will, to great and general applause, destroy culture.

This is one of those absurd statements made to generate either attention, discussion, or most likely both. When I read some statement like this in a magazine, I generally throw that magazine in the trash can, yell at the dog and go in search of something meaningful to read, like Field & Stream or Progressive Farmer. Or Mad Magazine.

Nick quotes Andrew Keen, who put down his thesaurus long enough to pop off this little gem:

If you democratize media, then you end up democratizing talent. The unintended consequence of all this democratization, to misquote Web 2.0 apologist Thomas Friedman, is cultural ‘flattening.’

What this means of course is that they are smarter than we are and we should just sit by our computers and wait for them to tell us what’s what.

I tend to agree with Mathew Ingram that this is a load of “load of elitist clap-trap.”

Andrew actually came within striking distance of one good point in his article- the convenient way some have forgotten the lessons of the first dot.com cycle, but his near-point is lost in a flood of pretentiousness that ends with the suggestion that we leave it to smart people like him to “discover, nurture, and reward elite talent.”

It was at this point that I gave up trying to figure out if he really meant this stuff or if it was some sort of over-the-top satire. If it’s satire, it’s boring. If they mean it, it’s boring and irritating.

Forrester just wants to get paid. Those guys want us to leave the heavy thinking to them.

I’m not buying either one.