We’ve just pushed out a few changes in our RSS feed generation that should make them work a bit better. There were a couple of cases causing RSS validation issues which we’ve sorted out. Please let us know at feedback@scouta.com if you are still having any issues with feeds.

Just as a reminder, here’s where you can find RSS from Scouta:

• Rated favourites per user at http://scouta.com/username/items. Insert any username you like, including your own. So, for example, my favourites list as RSS is http://scouta.com/members/gra/items
• Recommendations provided by Scouta at http://scouta.com/username/recommendations. Another example: see my personal recommendations feed at http://scouta.com/members/gra/recommendations
• The favourites in any group at http://scouta.com/groups/groupname/items. So, to get the faves in the Science group, try http://scouta.com/groups/Science/items. Setting up feeds for you favourite groups keeps you up to date.
• You can find the current top ten recommended items at http://scouta.com/top_10. We’re not really into driving everything from the top ten, but, well, maybe you like it?

You can, of course, take these feeds and stick them into desktop or web RSS reader applications or iTunes to give you a unique personal view of Scouta.

So, please have a play. And there’s more coming to feeds soon, including full Media RSS where we have the metadata available.

[Update: we just pushed out another little change to make RSS links work a little better.]

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.