Tip: Scouta faves and recommendation on your iPod

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.

Scouta Joins The APML Workgroup

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.