PodLeaders - Thought Leaders podcast

Episode 27 of the PodLeaders show - I decided to stop publishing the podcasts as a structured blog and instead publish them as a regular blog post. The structured blog posting was taking longer to post, was affecting the post’s presentation and i was not seeing any appreciable benefit from it - if you have any comments on this decision, please feel free to leave thm in the comments.

My guest on the show today is Kevin Burton, Kevin is the founder and CEO of TailRank - TailRank is a meme tracker - a site which tracks the main stories being written about on the blogosphere and ranks them by importance. Meme trackers can act a a powerful filter mechanism to help overcome information overload so I was interested to talk to Kevin about TailRank.

Here are all the questions I asked Kevin and the times in the interview I asked them:
Kevin - you might kick off with a little background on who Kevin Burton is and how you into this area… - 0:35

What is it that Tailrank does? - 1:23

And how do you define a top blog? 1:58

So it is a filter mechanism for people who are overburdened with information overload… - 2:37

Who are your target market with TailRank? - 3:20

Does TailRank have a business model? - 4:07

What do you see as the main differentiator between TailRank and Memeorandum? - 4:43

One of the main differentiators I would see between TailRank and Memeorandum is that Memeorandum has split out the politics and the tech side of things, is that something you are planning to address in TailRank as well? - 5:36

Questions from Damien Mulley:

Burtonator!

Tailrank is growing better and better and finally getting the recognition it deserves and about time too.

What I’d like to know though is how much work did you put into promoting Tailrank and getting people to recognise how good a service it is so that they’d write about it compared to the grunt work of coding it or did you let the application do the talking. Is the “let the application� do the talking method getting less and less attention now with the flood of web apps that are around the place? - 6:33

Which companiesand/or applications do you see as your main competitors and which apps do you see as complimentary to Tailrank? - 8:42

Your Golden Ticket idea - http://www.feedblog.org/2005/10/20_gets_you_a_t.html made you a quick few bucks but is it anything more than a short term method for getting some cash in to spend on necessities? How would you rate the success of it? Were there advantages and disadvantages to this? - 9:42

You’ve been very reticient about not handing over part of your company to investors (from what I make out). Is giving a large or small part of your company in exchange for cash a bad idea? Is this from personal experience or from what you have seen in the industry? How can one get investors and remain fully in control? - 11:34

How many people are in TailRank? - 13:42

A fun one (maybe). There’s been talk about the Sun being bought by Google rumour and how Digg and Memeorandom got gamed. How can one game Tailrank? Please note smilie face! - 14:39

Where do you see Tailrank fitting into the grand scheme of things. What do you see as being future steps for Tailrank? - 16:30

Bill Gates suffers an episode and instead of throwing chairs he gives you his cash stockpile. If there was one tech company out there that you could buy, what would it be and what would you do with it? - 18:05

And finally, looking ahead, what are the biggest changes you see coming down the line and how do you see them affecting TailRank? - 19:20

Download the entire interview here (10mb mp3)