One milestone of many Internet startups is an article on TechCrunch.

There are two main reasons for this. Firstly, and more obviously, it’s said to send a bunch of traffic to the site. That’s obviously important when a site relies on traffic to generate things like membership.

Secondly though, in my opinion, it is important for credibility. An article on TechCrunch shows that you’re likely to be a serious Internet player.

So today’s great news is TechCrunch wrote an awesome article about us.

Our aim is to release the features they mention very shortly. With more coming hot on their heals.

(We’ve been prototyping the iTunes client they mention since well before we had a website. And it makes for a compelling feature. Graeme talks about it as a round-trip recommendation. Listen to a podcast on your iPod, or watch a video on your Apple TV, and Scouta will create a recommendation that makes the “round-trip” back to iTunes for you to watch on your Apple TV, or listen on an iPod. You don’t even have to visit the Scouta site, as it is all automatic.)

Many thanks for the great write-up Nick, and thanks for the feedback Nik and Mike!

We’ve just been written up in TechCrunch: Scouta Media Recommendations: Soon in iTunes

Already the traffic is building.  This will be a good test of our servers, and a long night for me watching logfiles and our operations stats, just making sure that all is working as it should.

Generating publicity is at the top of my to-do list these days. A web service like Scouta requires slightly different angles to other everyday services, given that we’re trying to reach people that currently find online audio and video valuable for whatever reasons. Later this will extend, as the Internet as a distribution platform for the lounge room and mobile devices grows.

So, when I was reminded of the Nullarbor Nymph this afternoon, it was great timing.

The story says that back in 1971 there was a few sightings of a semi-naked woman on the Nullarbor Plane. Apparently she was friendly with a bunch of kangaroos, and was only clothed by a kangaroo skin bikini.

A Time magazine article at the time had this to say.

Desert-wise oldtimers in the sun-parched Nullarbor, however, were not convinced. “Any bird go flitting around in the scrub here with nothing on,” snorted one bushman, “would bloody soon burn off what’s bobbing, I can tip you.” Added Sheep Farmer Harvey Gurney: “The water holes are all dried up. She’d be burned to a crisp.”

It turns out the old blokes had it right, and that the Nullarbor Nymph was a hoax. Apparently, when a PR executive from Perth couldn’t afford to pay his hotel bill at the Eucla Motel, he said he’d put it on the map as payment. So he sent the story to a newspaper, and before long journalists around Australia, the U.S. and a full documentary crew from the BBC were on the way to Eucla.

So, if anyone has any ideas for Scouta’s Nullarbor Nymph, we’re all ears.

News.com.au has an article about the Nymph if you’re keen for more of the legend.

I just noticed on Techmeme that Flickr is aiming to launch a site to target Asia, starting with Hong Kong.

I’m headed to Beijing next week. We’ve talked for some time about taking Scouta to China, and while I’m there I’ll be talking with some people about Scouta China.

The BBC point out that “China has about 137 million web users - making it the second-largest online market.”

I’ll be in Beijing from March 22 through April 3, so if anyone is in town or knows someone I should chat with, email me.

Edit: See Mark Cuban’s clarification in the comment.

Mark Cuban, from HDNet, had a fascinating post about when people consume online video. However, as always, Mark skews the statistics to match the point he wants to make, not what the stats show.

Mark has this to say about some Comscore research.

When do more people watch online video than any other time ? From 10am to 5pm, mon to fri. Thats when 30pct of all online video viewing takes place. If you want to go a little earlier, for those that get to work early, add another 7pct. So that 37pct of all online viewing activity takes place from 7am to 5pm. Or put another way, about 50pct of all video viewing during weekdays happens from 7am to 5pm. Thats a big number.

I’m not sure how 37pct became 50pct in one sentence, but we’ll ignore that part of his argument as it seems he’s just grossly rounding up.

What’s more fascinating is what Mark doesn’t say, but is fortunately pointed out by others in his blog’s comments.

Matt makes the point in his comment.

That number seems smaller than I would expect. Let’s assume the average person is awake for 18 hours a day. That means you have 37% of online viewing during the 10 hours from 7AM-5PM. That leaves 63% of viewing in the other 8 hours. So unless I’m missing something here, that means people are viewing almost 2/3 of their videos from the time they get off work until they go to sleep.

It was exactly this that I picked up in Mark’s post. It would seem that 63% of weekday consumption of online video is outside of working hours. That number is huge.

I’d actually like Mark to clarify the numbers. Perhaps print them as a whole, instead of editing them to make his own point.

We’ve pushed another new release up onto the site.  Two big changes…

1. A bunch of recommender tuning.  The recommender generates your recommendations on your MyScouta page. As the Scouta population grows, we have more recommendation technologies to apply, so in the Don release we’ve turned on some more.  You’ll probably feel a difference in your recommendations.  Let us know what you think.

2. The front page is a bit more friendly for visitors — there’s more to go and do straight away.

So.. pop back for a look if you haven’t been by for a couple of days.

Gra knocked together Scouta’s own Twitter page.

If you use Twitter–everyone’s currently communications darling–and you’d like to be sent a random recent Scouta Favorite every so often, then become Scouta’s friend.

If you’re not quite sure about Twitter, then check out a few people’s opinions on Techmeme.

Graeme and I made an appearance on G’day World this morning (Gra had to stay up until 1am his time), to chat to Cameron Reilly about Scouta. You can hear the show here.

It took us a little while to explain exactly what Scouta is, but it was a fun podcast where Cam managed to get a few digs in about our former podcasting endeavors. I also manage to steal an extra 15 minutes at the end of the podcast to talk about Telstra, and the Australian broadband mess.

We talk about Scouta, what it is, how we raised funds, a few lessons, and the future (near and far) of Scouta.

Thanks for the opportunity to chat Cam, it was good fun. I’m also loving the new hair style.

So, if you’ve been playing with Scouta a bit and have some recommendation generated for you, it is really, really easy to take those recommendations and get some of them onto your iPod. This means you can end up with an always-ready feed of new podcasts to watch and listen to on your iPod from your Scouta recommendations.

Not all generated recommendations are compatible with iTunes and the iPod playing formats, but happily iTunes figures that out in a nice friendly way so we don’t have to bother about it.

Here’s how:

1. Firstly, you’ll need to be a Scouta member if you want to get your own recommendations. Join up at http://scouta.com/members/join if you haven’t already.
2. On your MyScouta page, there are two lists — one called favorites and the other called recommended. See under the headings, there’s a subscribe in itunes link. Clicking on those links will start your iTunes and go to the podcast section, where it will add these links as RSS feeds. (If you haven’t joined yet and want to see a MyScouta page, have a look at mine)
3. iTunes will read the feed and start downloading the files it can use with iTunes or the iPod.

Okay, you now have one or two new RSS feeds coming into yout iTunes. What next? Make sure your iPod is downloading the podcasts and videos for these feeds - when you sync your iPod, look on the Podcasts tab to make sure that you are downloading the relevant feeds. They will be called something like Scouta: recommendations for username and Scouta: username’s items. They’ll be named the same on your iPod too.

The recommendations… feed is your recommendations generated by scouta, whereas the items… list is the set of faves you’ve added to scouta yourself or given good ratings to.
I use this feature a lot to serve up fresh podcasts for my commute. Each day is a surprise, but the power of the recommendation system is that I’m almost always served up something interesting. Try it. But be warned. Once you set this going, you get pretty quickly frustrated having to go back to searching for podcasts by hand.

And for bonus points, you can do the same with groups as well — so get your friends together, make a group, and you can all listen/watch the same stuff together as you all add stuff to the group together. This works beautifully for a community working together on something.. This is a great way to all be on the same page by sharing a set of audio and video favourites.

One aspect of Scouta that we’re very passionate about is making sure that it is open, and members have freedom. So we have a bunch of features that are on the way that will be focusing on making sure that members can do what they want with their favorites and recommendations, among other things.

That’s why we’re very excited to announce that we’ve joined the APML Workgroup.

APML will allow users to export and use their own personal Attention Profile in much the same way that OPML allows them to export their reading lists from Feed Readers.

The idea is to boil down all forms of Attention Data – including Browser History, OPML, Attention.XML, Email etc – to a portable file format containing a description of ranked user interests.

If that sounds like mumbo-jumbo, let me explain one major benefit: consumer freedom. If anyone can take their own information, and add it or delete it, from a range of services, then you have choice.

At the moment there are dozens (actually, probably hundreds, if not thousands) of services that collect this information. But there is no easy way for you to claim it, and take it with you. So, that’s one of the workgroup’s aims.

Given Scouta’s aim for member freedom, it made a lot of sense us joining the group.

We’ve joined an amazing class of people in the workgroup, and are very humbled to be amongst them.