How-To Make The Most Of Scouta

Scouta’s main aim is to provide highly relevant recommendations for each member. We think of it as enhanced word-of-mouth, like a best friend that knows exactly what you like.

But how do new members get the most of Scouta?

We thought we’d whack together a brief how-to that focused on making the most of it.

When you join Scouta you are provided with your own “My Scouta” page. This is where you see all your own information, including your member name, bio, profile, and importantly any Favorites you bookmark, or your personal Recommendations.

But these are usually empty when you start. So what should you do?

Favorites

Favorites are the bookmarks of online audio and video that you love. To get the best out of Scouta you should only add the ones that you are passionate about. Scouta gives a lot of weight to things you bookmark, because we figure you must really enjoy them to make the effort.

It’s also important to link directly to the source of the audio or video. So that means the actual MP3 file, AVI file, YouTube page, Google Video page….you get the idea.

So far, Scouta will also automatically add an embedded player for a range of file types: any MP3, and video from YouTube, MySpace, Google Video, Veoh, Metacafe, Revver, iFilm, Grouper, Guba, Jumpcut, MSN Soapbox, Liveleak, Brightcove, and Superdeluxe. More are coming.

But what if you can’t immediately think of anything worth-while bookmarking. You can still browse Tags or Groups to see what other members are paying attention to. When you find bookmarks you like, you can rate them as “Good,” and they’ll be added to your own Favorites.

Recommendations

Recommendations only happen when Scouta begins to learn about your interests and tastes. It’s also like any good friend, the more your tell them, the better they are at making great suggestions. So Scouta will only provide recommendations as your either add bookmarks, or you rate other people’s favorites. The more you do, the better it will get.

It’s also going to get much smarter as we tweak the system.

Bottom line: add bookmarks, and rate things you enjoy or hate.

Groups

When we first built groups, and deployed it with our friends testing the beta, I was amazed at how useful they were. I always thought they’d be great, but when I started to use them myself, the penny dropped.

You can setup a group on a topic, like Battlestar Galactica, Entrepreneurs, or Music Videos.

You can also set up a Group for a bunch of friends or family, and if you like make it completely private, so only people you invite can share the videos.

So there is a brief bunch of tips to help you get started using Scouta. There is much more to it, but we’ll leave a few of the other features for a future article.