It’s been a big few weeks for Scouta, with the re-design, release of the Mac iTunes Agent, and Iccarus. We’ve garnered a lot of positive attention, and ramped up membership.

However, it hasn’t stopped there. I was stoked to receive a great bit of feedback yesterday from Rob Abbott in the form of a blog post: Scouta CEO Reaches Out, Provides Support and Implements User Feedback.

Scouta not only goes above and beyond to support their users, but most importantly they listen to what their users have to say. They have also shown that they can fix an issue quickly and improve their user experience and usability in the process.

Check out the blog post for the whole context.

It’s great to have someone respond so positively. We’re really eager to get any feedback, so we’re constantly encouraging it. So, in all honesty, we don’t see it as going above and beyond, just normal practice. But still, it’s great to have someone say it .

Which reminds me…please provide any and all feedback to myself, or feedback@scouta.com.

Here’s a screencast of Iccarus. It gives you a closer look at what it can do.

Last week we decided that we’d like to enter the uber-cool Webjam competition that was being held in Perth for the first time. We didn’t just want to show Scouta, because we see it every day. We wanted to show something we thought was super-cool.

A couple of extra screen captures are in my Flickr stream, and a screencast is being developed.

We came up with the idea of visualizing Scouta’s activity in 3D. So Simon spent part of the weekend hacking together ICCARUS: Interactive Command Console and Relational User Statistics (a name we tried to make as dry and boring as possible, so it would contrast the actual application).

Last night we presented ICCARUS, and it won the event! Below is the video of the presentation.

I’d personally like to thank Simon! It was his insane coding skill that made it all possible.

Also a big thanks to Lachlan Hardy, Lisa Herrod, and Tim Lucas for bringing Webjam across. And Myles for the effort on this end.

And a big thanks to Adobe for the prize of CS3.

I’ve managed to get back in the podcasting game a little lately, thanks to a couple of good mates.

Cameron Reilly has been inviting me to co-host a show or two, which hopefully will become a little regular. We chatted last Sunday about a range of things from Castro to Scouta.

Dave Gray at the Global Geek Podcast also chatted with me last night, and the interview went live today.

I really enjoy doing podcasts, and even more so when prep and post are done by someone else . It’s great to have a bit of a chin-wag with a couple of mates. So I hope I’ll get to chat some more over the coming weeks.

One I’m especially excited about is a chat I have scheduled with Mark Frauenfelder on his Rule the Web podcast. It’s conducted via Blog Talk Radio, which means anyone has the opportunity to dial in and ask a question. It’s scheduled for 4pm (PST) Wednesday August 8, so make sure you tune in and give us a call with any of your questions.

While you’re at it, check out his new book and website: Rule the Web. I’d recommend it to anyone who is interested in the Internet. It’s one of those books with interesting tidbits for any level of Internet user.

Last week we released the Scouta Agent for Mac: a nifty piece of software that checks what podcast and vodcast subscriptions you have in iTunes, and uses those to provide personal recommendations. It then continues to provide recommendations based on what your watching and listening to in iTunes, iPod, iPhone, and the Apple TV.

Clinton, our application developer, is full tilt into development of the Windows version. As you’d expect, we’re eager to start testing how it runs, and see if we can pick up some of the bugs early. So, this is a call-out to anyone who uses iTunes on Windows to subscribe to podcasts and vodcasts.

The initial testing won’t do much, the updates aren’t actually send to our database, but it shouldn’t be too long before we can turn them on and you’ll start receiving recommendations.

If you’d be interested in helping us test, email feedback@scouta.com.

Yesterday we made a release that I think is Scouta’s biggest event: we released our Agent for iTunes.

When Graeme and I first talked about the Scouta concept back in 2005, the key to it’s acceptance was ease of use. Graeme then spent weeks building a proof of concept that would allow our recommendations to be based on a member’s iTunes library. That has since been redesigned and improved, and yesterday was made public.

Basically the Mac version of our Scouta Agent for iTunes will update a member’s Scouta account with their podcast and vodcast subscriptions. It will then provide recommendations based on those that are listened to or watched. The clever part, if we do say so ourselves, is that it will only take into account the ones that you’ve almost completely watched or listened to. We figure that if you’ve only listened to a few minutes of a half hour show, it’s not a favorite.

What’s even cooler is it also works seamlessly with iPods, iPhones, and the Apple TV. I listen to podcasts on my iPod every day, and now watch video podcasts on my Apple TV. The new software means Scouta gives me personal recommendations without any extra effort. I literally just watch and listen to shows on these devices, and I receive new recommendations that are sent straight to the iPod or Apple TV.

The Windows version is currently in development, and should be available soon! We also hope to look into working with other media players. So, if there are any people who are keen to help us add support for other media software, let us know.

We also spent the best part of a month working on improving the look of the site, and adding some extra features that put conversations and activity updates right in to a member’s My Scouta page. It means that if you have friends using Scouta, or have joined a Scouta Group, you can easily share podcasts or video, or stay a part of the conversations.

Many thanks to Clint, our Agent developer, and Simon, our web developer, who have been tirelessly working on the code, making it an ace service that we’re all really proud of.

You can read about and download the Scouta Agent for iTunes here.