I decided to try out Scoutle after reading about it a while back. The concept is “automatic social networking” something that was appealing in principle and seemed worth a try.

The way it works is that you create a Scout – a virtual representation of your blog, website or social network profile. You then install a small stage somewhere on your website – this acts both as a tracker for website activity and somewhere on which other related scouts can appear – promoting other relevant websites.

Scoutle are trying to build a network of sites ranked by relevance and usefulness, it’s a grand target to aim at and I can only guess at the the way they are ranking each scout. It appears to be some form of input/output analysis model similar to Google’s pagerank in that your rank is affected by the rank of the scouts with which you have made a connection.

Where the system starts to fall down for me is that it’s not very automatic, I need to login to the site periodically to check the meetings that my scout has had and manually choose to request connections with other scouts. It would be nice if Scoutle would automatically create these connections when a certain number of meetings were reached – like the way I can set MyBlogLog to add me to a site community if I visit the site a certain number of times.

Scoutle also has concepts of Guides and Networks, which are ways to categorise and group scouts. These both seem to serve the same purpose and could probably be replaced by a simple tag search – unless Scoutle have future plans to enhance them.

I’m going to persevere with Scoutle for the time being as I have found interesting new sites and blogs through it – alas not automatically but by browsing the guides and networks, but I can’t help thinking that it needs some sort of killer feature or wow factor before it will really catch on.