We’re constantly working on making Scouta easier to use, and easier to understand. It’s definitely an art and a science getting everything right.

The other day someone mentioned to me that the new front page to Scouta, is harder to understand than the older one. So I through a question out to everyone on Twitter, and over a 30 minute period indulged in a brainstorm with a bunch of people. Proving how useful tools like Twitter really are.

The end result is the new blurb on the front page: “Finding you great video and podcasts.” It sounds so simple, but getting a nice and simple description can often be difficult. More work needs to be done, but I’m really happy with the new blurb.

Thanks to Duncan Riley, Bronwen Clune, Myles Eftos, Gary Barber, Harriet Wakelam, Jodie Miners, Mike Minutillo, Twenty Seven, Elias, Chris Barraud, Kate Quinn, and Hugo Sharp. Hope I didn’t miss anyone.

When YouTube announced that it was going to re-encode it’s videos to H.264, we got pretty excited at Scouta. Flash is a great format for the current web, because all the major browsers support it. However, for mobile content, Flash isn’t the best.

Podcasting has taught us many things, but the most important is that media portability is incredibly important. So, we hoped that YouTube would quickly provide a way for everyone to access the H.264 files. If that happens, they’d make it possible for Scouta to automatically provide YouTube recommendations to iPods, iPhones, Apple TV, and many cell phones.

We’re still waiting.

So, today I grabbed a little command line application called tcpflow, so that I could watch my home network when I browsed YouTube from my iPod Touch.

Here’s some of the output.


GET /videodownload?version=0&secureurl=sAAAALxRpszUgT
K_K_xaZ04iy5tG5s0RQGCogbu2j7BRaDGlNUv_oRDCosYqQ2m
hyWH6ROC25CylWLkipiikyQ97c3BCl2u1oDLrNNmn8NfBQVH7
K586K8rKe9duBiKIrFEfZ46utV6egrAmilzAKQOnpUG8YNA8Oz
6Jhzcv6Hx7wHsnESwNF9XrwO_pnP1x5O7W367U3uI585NSGf
f0UapBOQO-1rkBSaoA3g8yExqnvjVvY-rhOOFptCTRaPPjjvfy5g
&sigh=cdwzKab_vQuTVjgHSBfXHDBtB4Y&begin=0&len=96000
&docid=-4739947727435681593&rdc=1 HTTP/1.1
Accept: */*
Accept-Language: en
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Cookie: PREF=ID=5af2541129cf8155:TM=1190888574:LM=1190894284:
GM=1:S=6a4wxk3bXXUt_t7a; SID=DQAAAIAAAACnwx-TfmGUo8rZC25O
UipW5UUislyZM3MJBYVws8uJJOIrF75qawK5Q-PzADqxKJcrv1BES7ELImq
kiM-xZLvGe0c4PvhR-pYD0xXqHgVVNuAp44oQtyoXCwPIUB_vRXNQR5GK3
dv_NPLdKBd0W312_q3xu66fD412BaeGJ_-c0A
User-Agent: Apple iPhone v1.1.1 CoreMedia v1.0.0.3A110a
Connection: keep-alive
Range: bytes=0-1
Host: annz.vp.video.l.google.com


This shows us the host, and the URL that the iPod used to grab a YouTube video. Put it together and you get:


http://annz.vp.video.l.google.com/videodownload?version=0
&secureurl=sAAAALxRpszUgTK_K_xaZ04iy5tG5s0RQGCogbu2j
7BRaDGlNUv_oRDCosYqQ2mhyWH6ROC25CylWLkipiikyQ97c3
BCl2u1oDLrNNmn8NfBQVH7K586K8rKe9duBiKIrFEfZ46utV6eg
rAmilzAKQOnpUG8YNA8Oz6Jhzcv6Hx7wHsnESwNF9XrwO_pnP
1x5O7W367U3uI585NSGff0UapBOQO-1rkBSaoA3g8yExqnvjVv
Y-rhOOFptCTRaPPjjvfy5g&sigh=cdwzKab_vQuTVjgHSBfXHDBt
B4Y&begin=0&len=96000&docid=-4739947727435681593
&rdc=1


Several interesting things are immediately evident.

First, it’s not simple to convert a normal YouTube link to this H.264 URL. Here’s the original URL:


http://youtube.com/watch?v=vjhSp7xGsMc


Second, they’ve implemented security: a secureurl parameter.

Third, you can’t open this URL in Firefox. Opening in Safari has a different result: the .mp4 file downloads. So it would seem they have implemented a couple of security features.

Understandably Google/YouTube want to protect their business to some degree. But, it would be nice if YouTube would open up the H.264 URL to potential partners. After all, the wider their content is available, the better their chance of monetizing. Right?

So, consider this an informal “pretty please” from Scouta to Google: Please allow us to access your files in H.264, pretty please.

Scoble mentioned in Twitter today that Eric Nolan “doesn’t think anyone watches my whole video.” I’m assuming that Nolan makes that comment in a recent vodcast that Scoble published, but I’m not sure. I’d have to download and watch the whole show, and based on some recent stats we’ve pulled from Scouta, there’s only a 10% chance that I’d watch any of the show, and only a 5% chance I’d watch more than 50%.

Now, don’t get me wrong, these stats aren’t definitive. There based on a very small sample size:
- 117 people
- 4329 podcasts

Here’s what the statistics look like randomly.

Here’s what the statistics look like with the most listened/watched shows through to those that aren’t consumed at all.

So, based on this very small sample, only 10% of downloaded podcasts are consumed to any degree, and only 50% of those are consumed over 50%.

As far as we know, this is cutting edge information. I’m certainly not aware of any hard data about podcast consumption, because usually the statistics are based on number of downloads.

Over the next few weeks we’ll be playing with these statistics some more. Undoubtedly we’ll have much more data to play with, and we’ll have a pretty clear idea about how many people consume the podacsts they download.

Today we made public our Scouta Agent for iTunes on Windows.

As with the Mac version, this has been planned since Graeme and I conceived the Scouta idea. We aimed to have it generate recommendations based on your behavior, rather than having to rate or bookmark items manually. Making recommendations work seamlessly with you and your devices.

If you have Windows, and use iTunes to subscribe to podcasts or videos, then you can download the new version and start receiving personal recommendations straight into iTunes, your iPod, you iPhone, or Apple TV.

Next up: cell phones and televisions .

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.