TailRank Enters TechCrunch Teeth
If you’re the founder of a floundering web 2.0 company and you decide to call out TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington for “complete journalistic incompetence” for calling out your company for its flounderingness, you probably should be really really sure that your company isn’t actually floundering, let alone circling the drain of ye olde dead pool.
In this case we’re talking about TailRank and its founder Kevin Burton, both of whom got absolutely reamed on TechCrunch yesterday for failing to do much of anything to back up Burton’s earlier assertions that TailRank was healthier than ever. And off-the-charts wailing and demands for apologies and retractions usually doesn’t do a lot to help either.
Having spam and porn as your “top news” and months old or nonexistent (in the case of Technology) stories elsewhere does not a tracking “the hottest news in the blogosphere” superstar web platform make. TailRank’s plight is obvious, and Burton would have done himself a great deal of good, for what it’s worth, to acknowledge this immediately.
I was a semi-regular user of TailRank once upon a time, probably over a year ago now. The problem from the beginning was that other sites (Techmeme, Digg, Reddit) did a better job of tracking and aggregating web stories and TailRank never found the right space between them with the right set off tools to gain some buzz, audience, and market share. At some point, TailRank removed the ability for users to submit their own stories to its system, and that’s around the time I stopped visiting.
