Scout’s Honour

Australian Anthill, a great publication for anyone in business in Australia, published a great article about Scouta today (Issue 21).

I spoke with Paul Ryan, Anthill’s Editor, a short while ago, and he spent a bunch of time playing with Scouta. So it turned out to be a great article that highlights exactly what Scouta is about.

Giles and business partner Graeme Sutherland recently launched Scouta, an online video and podcast recommendation service that Giles describes as like having your best mates always online, offering media recommendations based on their intimate knowledge of your personal taste.

“Community sites have always been focused on the community as a whole,” says Giles. “We’re focused on an individual and what they love - that could be anything from sport to entrepreneurship. We’ve stayed away from top-ten lists. We’re the anti-top ten, if you like - the epitome of long tail.”

The article spends some time explaining what Scouta does, and also a bit of the business background. A nice summary. Grab a copy from your local news stand, and you’ll also find a bunch of other great material in the magazine.

Thanks for the great write up Paul.

Celebrity Scouta: Mark Frauenfelder

I met the latest Celebrity Scouta after asking if he and his partner, Carla Sinclair, would be guests on my old Gadget Show podcast a couple of years ago. We then met face-to-face at last years ETech, where he was showing the audience how to “make” craft.

The time I’ve spent with this Celebrity Scouta has shown that he is an incredibly nice guy, who has time for everyone, even though he must be inundated with requests for his time. Especially when you realize he runs one of the world’s most popular weblogs, boingboing.net, is the editor- in-chief of MAKE, and an illustrator. He’s also an author with his new book, Rule The Web: How to Do Everything on the Web, Faster, Better, Easier, due in June.

Thanks for compiling your list of favorite online audio Mark.