TailRank my new "home"

Late last week I decided to dust off my trusty PowerBook G4 and make it my main machine again. A new battery and RAM upgrade later and I was in business. I can't begin to describe how much more capable this machine is with a gig of RAM under its belt. The battery life is still poor (2.5 hours); but it used to be abysmal (30 minutes). I figure I'll make this do for another year or so while the native Intel apps are making their way to market and then upgrade to a MacBook Pro (god I hate that name).

As part of the transition, I've switched from Bloglines to NetNewsWire for feed reading. Mostly I'm happy with the change -- it's very cool to be able to read offline and to have good integration with desktop-based blogging editors.

This did, however, create a conundrum for me: what page to use for my browser home page? It's been Bloglines for quite a while now. After a few days spent playing with blogosphere favorite tech.memeorandum, I started to realize that most of what was showing up there was already in my feed reader. Then I remembered that Kevin Burton's TailRank has been evolving a good bit lately.

I first met Kevin back at Barcamp and he immediately struck me as one of those really clever guys you occasionally bump into around Silicon Valley: smart, passionate, full of energy and opinions. When I heard that he'd started working on TailRank I was really intrigued. The idea of using linking behavior in the blogosphere, combined with OPML reading lists as the basis for creating a self-organzing view of current hot discussion topics felt just right to me. Sure Gabe Riviera is doing something similar with memeo; but for the moment, I like the story mix that's turning up on TailRank better. What's working here for me is that TailRank is bringing in interesting topics that I'm not already bumping up against in my normal feed reading.

At any rate, TailRank is my new homepage. So far I'm enjoying the news it brings each time I pull up the browser. Nice work Kevin; looking forward to watching TailRank grow and evolve. You've got a winner here.