Scouta Media Recommendations: Soon in iTunes
Nick Gonzalez
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Scouta is a new service that has recently launched that recommends audio and video content to members of the site based on content that they are interested in. Scouta has indexed content across a wide variety of sites to allow users to find and receive content from any of these sites rather than searching on each individual site. This means that it has a large catalog that is a superset of the big libraries and directories.
They are announcing today that in a few weeks time, they will have a Mac iTunes client that will allow users to directly view or listen to their recommendations or your own bookmarked content. The plugin will also track what you listen to and watch in iTunes and send that information back to Scouta. This is similar to iLike except that it works across all content from both iTunes and Scouta itself (where you can track content on a large number of video and content sites). They will also open up an API so that others can develop tools or integrate Scouta and its recommendations.
Most ’starting points’ on content sites such as YouTube show the most popular videos, or the highest rated videos, from all users. While you can sometimes break these stats down by region (in YouTube you still can’t - resulting in a large number of foreign-language (well, foreign to English speakers) now dominating the main content pages), more often than not you are looking at content that generally doesn’t match what each individual may be interested in.
Scouta will track media that you have bookmarked, as well as media your friends have bookmarked along with any groups that you are part of and use that information to show you recommended content. From our initial tests, it seems to work well and we found interesting links pretty quickly. Scouta provide a bookmarklet so that you can bookmark content into Scouta without going back to your page. They also provide RSS feeds for almost everything on the site (it is interesting to have your recommendations delivered to you in your news aggregator)
Scouta was founded in Perth, Australia and is privately funded.
May 3rd, 2007 at 9:16 pm
May 20th, 2007 at 11:57 pm
February 1st, 2008 at 2:01 am