Official Scoutle Blog

I asked a question on Linkedin last night. First time I ever did. And the answers were very quick! Someone adviced me to refer better to this blog… Done that. And someone said the benefits were not clear enough. I’ve added a Flash movie and did some redesign of the homepage.

Also… I’ve registered a new domain name again. I will launch two new services this week. More info later on. I am also very proud Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief of TheNextWeb.org wrote an article about Scoutle! Thanks a lot!

Most likely you will find my current emotions in all innovation books… The current early adopters are getting a bit impatient. Although I understand it, it’s so hard to fight or to make them feel different with the amount of time I find in a day.

I spend a lot of time reading and replying reviews. Scoutle has had a huge rush because of all the press attention. But that press attention is gone as fast as it came. This was a very good start and test. It made me work very hard to optimize the scripts. However, in these Internet times one demands so much more in such little time that it’s hard to deal with. Of course, I am very happy with the current number of users but it needs to be let’s say 10 times as much to start working.

Current users claim to “attract only little more traffic from Scoutle”. However, Scoutle doesn’t want to bother anybody. Scoutle doesn’t spam all users to visit your blog, only suggests your blog to others that are likely to be interested. And it only suggests, which is a passive form as well, to current users. This may not be thousands of user and besides, after three weeks, I can’t deliver you thousands of new visitors every day. Don’t forget that users that found your blog through Scoutle may just as well bookmark your blog and come in directly, without passing Scoutle!!!

The benefits of Scoutle may not always be seen in your statistics. Scoutle will work better when the right amount of users is reached so I would like to ask all early adopters to have some patience. What I do take serious is a complaint that I found on a forum today. First of all, I would like to ask you to drop me a line first with any complaints you have, so I can fix it and won’t have to find it out myself. Anyway, the complaint was about users spamming other users to Connect. Without any form of common interest and users that just spam again.

This is a serious threat to Scoutle since Scoutle is all about finding interesting blogs and getting more interested users without having to do anything. What I will do, is maximize the number of open Connections. I hope this will make users think twice before “wasting connection requests”. If you reject a request, this will have a form of influence as well.
So again… Traffic that Scoutle brings may not always be visible in your statistics and Scoutle is still in beta with, when comparing to other networks, a very small network at the moment. Scoutle should not be harmful in any way so this I take very serious.

A nice little thing I noticed today. Before Scoutle came online May 8th, a search for ‘Scoutle’ in Google (Dutch) would result in Google being very kind and suggesting me “Did you mean scoutel?” I told my uncle:”My first goal is to get rid of that line!”

Well… I am very happy to report that Google does not think of a typing error anymore when writing the word Scoutle!

Today I got a phone call around 14.00. Radio 1, one of the Dutch National Radio stations, found out about Scoutle in the Washington Post and asked me to come to the studio that evening to talk about it in the Radio program “Radio Online“.

Well, of course! It was a very nice experience and I am very thankful they asked me to come.
Hopefully this will also help to attract more Dutch users.

You can listen to the broadcast here.

I had to hire a new server now, after a month already. Although Scoutle is only costing me money, it is like a hobby. Some have a very expensive sailing boat or motor bike, I have a server

But the new server had to come with a new IP address. DNS changes took over 24 hours so that was not very cool but well… I hope this server may also help new users to try Scoutle out and wait until there are enough users to fully function.