Kevin Burton is the founder of Tailrank. Previously, he was the author of the NewsMonster RSS aggregator and a co-Founder of Rojo Networks, which was purchased by SixApart. Visit the company blog here and his blog here.

What is TailRank and what are its major advantages over similar services?

Tailrank is a service that allows you to track the hottest news stories across the blogosphere.

There are a few similar services but we track more blogs, allow the user to create their own version of Tailrank, support full-text search, and allow delivery via Instant Messenger.

We're also working on a few other surprises which we should have available in the next few weeks so stay tuned.

What did you learn from Rojo, your previous startup, and how have you applied the knowledge to Tailrank?

Mostly just solidification of what I already knew. For example, Tailrank does one thing and does it very well. We're trying to keep the feature set small so we can be the the best memetracker out there. Google did a very good job at this back in the day by simply being a very good search engine. Once they essentially had 40% of the market and were profitable they moved into other areas.

How many people work on TailRank?

We're still a small company. I'm working on it full time and we have three consultants that help out when necessary. I'm trying to keep it lean and mean for now. We'll probably hire a few other full time employees in a few weeks.