An interview with Kevin Burton
After we did the Tail Rank DOA article Kevin Burton was kind enough to get hold of us and let us know some things that are upcoming with Tail Rank, and his new project Spinn3r. Below is the QA conducted by e-mail, we prefaced our questions with Techwag and put them italics, and Kevin’s responses with KB. We decided to leave the last question in line because we here at techwag didn’t get the full idea of what was in the broadcast that we had watched, and Kevin corrected what we were talking about.
Techwag: Tell us about Spinn3r, what are your goals for the web site?
KB: Spinn3r is more of a data indexing service than a website. When we built Tailrank we had a number of clients request access to our crawler. Instead of just setting these up on a ad hoc basis for individual customers we just decided to productize it and make it available to everyone.
We’re planning on releasing Spinn3r 2.0 in the next couple of weeks. We’ve been obviously spending a lot of time improving our technology and expanding the service.
We have a number of clients using the system now which we’re really excited about. We also have a number of researchers using our data (free of charge I might add) to work on some really cool projects.
Techwag: What are the future plans for tailrank?
KB: Tailrank will obviously benefit from our technological investment in Spinn3r.
Features for the next version of Tailrank mostly involve improved recall, accuracy, and significantly improved clustering. Some UI features as well.
Fun stuff basically…
We’ve also been working on a new product that benefits from the infrastructure we’ve built around Spinn3r and Tailrank. Hopefully this will ship before 2008 …
Techwag: Where do you see web 2.0 going in the next 2 to 3 years?
Honestly, most of my work involves scalable cluster design and I’m not sure I could give any accurate predictions towards anything as high level as Web 2.0.
On the database side of things I think we’ll see a lot more open source work around building large scale cluster compute environments.
Most of the work to date has involved in scaling out single machines. Basically buying one BIG database with multiple CPUs, LOTS of disks, and LOTS of memory.
The next generation of work will be spent on mid-range machines but hundreds of them.
This is our philosophy. We have about 25 machines at present and will probably be buying two racks of servers in the next few few months.
All of this work should benefit other Web 2.0 startups. Powerset is using Hadoop and working an open source implementation of Bigtable for example. Both were first pioneered at Google and are now becoming more mainstream.
Techwag: What role do you see blogging taking in the future, how will tailrank or spinn3r work with your future vision?
KB: I think we’ll see the chasm between journalists and bloggers narrow a bit. This is a good thing of course as it will mean more freedom for journalists and more money for professional bloggers.
Techwag: If you could have just one thing out of the internet what would that be?
KB: Actually, more influence over politics would be really nice. If you read my blog it’s a bit obvious that I don’t care for the Bush administration. I really wish the Internet was more powerful in this regard but since Dean the Internet really hasn’t been used for anything amazingly powerful.
Techwag: What is your opinion of Valleywag?
KB: Ha.. No comment. 
Techwag: Do you think that bloggers will go to more audio and/or video assets?
KB: More video actually…… I’m planning on adopting video personally. I just need to buy a camera now.
Techwag: What is your opinion of broadcast your life or lifestreams on the internet? How will spinn3r and/or tailrank work with a stream of consciousness internet? Example: Justin.tv
KB: haven’t thought about how Tailrank would handle this. Probably the same way as any other URL really. I thought it was a bit of a fad at first (think Jenny-cam) but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
If Justin had a real producer/writer I’m sure he could make Justin.TV huge - reality-TV huge.
Techwag: Where do you think that internet indexes need to improve, what will a blog index look like in 3 to 5 years?
KB: There’s just too much spam right now actually. It’s a BIG problem. Duplicate (stolen) content is also a pretty significant issue as well.
We’re spending a LOT of time on this issue.
Techwag: When you gave your interview with Robert Scoble http://www.podtech.net/scobleshow/technology/1258/conversation-with-memetracker-developer-kevin-burton do you still stand by the idea that geeks need to help people out with the language translation? What would you advise a company to do when there is too much jargon on the table?
KB: Hm………. I think I was talking about translation between languages. From English to Japanese for example.
Again we would like to thank Kevin for answering our questions via e-mail.
tailrank is still DOA:
http://tech.tailrank.com/
less interviews, more work
Still down? agree, more work less play. Grin.
[…] issues that Tail Rank suffered from, lack of interest from the folks who built it. The owners have moved on, the car is still drivable, but does not know that it is just not as loved as it used to be. In all […]