SOMEWHAT FRANK

Megite & TailRank Rank Top Web Videos

With loads of video to sort through on the web Megite and TailRank both launched new video features today (December 27, 2006) which present a quick view of the most popular videos of the day.

Megite, the news aggregator highlighted recently for its personal aggregator improvements, has added a feature to help point out popular videos with Megite Video. According to a post on the Megite blog Megite Video:

"...crawls hundreds of thousands of blogs for links to video on more than 20 video sharing services such as YouTube, Google Video, MySpace, Daily Motion, Metacafe, Ifilm, Vimeo, Break, Revver, Grouper, Bolt, Yoqoo, 6Rooms, and more."

Megite Video ranks and displays videos based on popularity by taking the following factors into account:

1. The importance of a blog
2. The popularity of a blog
3. The number of blogs that are discussing a video

Megite founder, Matthew Chen, explained over email that he hopes to eventually be able to leverage user metrics such as click through data as a passive input into the Megite Video ranking system. Additionally, Megite is investigating active inputs in the form of voting for popular videos but is aware that spam prevention will have to be part of an effective implementation.

TailRank, a product highlighted previously on Somewhat Frank, rolled out video tracking components via the TailRank Video channel to present popular video contents of the web. Similar to Megite, TailRank 2.1 uses links as a key component to video popularity.

For other perspectives on the Megite and TailRank video products please check out these articles on: TechCrunch and SpashCast.

Bottom-line: Megite and TailRank both offer great products for a quick view of the most popular online videos based primarily on linking. I hope both these products continue to evolve and improve their respective video popularity algorithms.

Tailrank 2.0 Aggregator Rolled Out

Tailrank, the blog post aggregator, has launched a slick new interface redesign and a few additional features. According to the Tailrank blog:

"The majority of the work on this release has been on our ranking algorithms. Tailrank now breaks stories faster, cluster them better, and generally does a better job at finding the hottest news in the blogosphere."

The new Tailrank also enables a user to track each story via RSS or by AOL Instant Messenger. This could be a helpful feature with stories that get a lot of coverage and are worth tracking via IM alerts. Tailrank also introduced archives for the most popular stories of the week which could come in very handy if you miss a day or two of news. In addition to the algorithmic changes and story tracking features Tailrank is looking to expand to add new categories, like entertainment, with more to come soon. Finally, Tailrank hints at a number of new features within the next couple of weeks. It will be interesting to see what Tailrank 2.1 will bring.

Bottom-line: The new Tailrank looks much improved and will probably give Gabe Rivera's Techmeme some solid competition.

Related Link: Aggregators: Multiplying Like Rabbits