Scoutle: the best way to find friends is to do nothing

Doing nothing and getting more traffic sounds like a typical spam promise, right? Well, most of the times it is. But now I need you to get past this prejudice for once – just for once! – to look with me at Scoutle. This Dutch start-up helps you to attract more visitors by just installing a simple widget – a so-called Stage – on your blog. And the best thing is.., these new visitors are probably really interested in what you have to say. Sounds almost too good to be true, so let’s take a closer look.

A Scoutle Stage

Scoutle works as follows: after you’ve installed the Stage on your blog, the service sends out a Scout – a personal webcrawler. This scout “walks through the Internet”. The more visitors you have, the more sites your scout will cover. Its goal is to find other scouts of which some might come from bloggers who have similar interests and profiles. If this happens, you’ll be notified so that you can get in touch with them. When both parties agree on a connection, they can see each others contacts. The result is a new network of bloggers who all have similar interests. They’ll probably start reading each others blogs and send out some trackbacks. So eventually, everybody gets more traffic.

The idea is really good, particularly because bloggers can just focus on creating content while some automatic Scout is looking for possible blog soul mates. When a match is made, they can enjoy each others readings. Almost a perfect execution of modern social networking.

But there’s one danger to it. Bloggers might install the Stage and send out a scout just to gain more traffic. This is not the best attitude for your users. They install the service and wait for their number of visitors to skyrocket. If this doesn’t happen quickly, they might quit the service. That’s why Scoutle may be better off with promoting itself as a service to find valuable blog contacts.

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I’m going to give Scoutle a shot, and see if I’ll meet some interesting people these coming weeks. Founder Godfried van Loo told me he is eager for some feedback, so leave a comment if you have anything to add. If you’d excuse me now, I have to instruct a scout to find me some new blog friends.