BTW, we are shooting to launch Version 1 by Friday next week (3rd Feb). God help us!! Oi!!

It’s probably a good time to update on Podmatcher. Remember Podmatcher was spawned from X²O. X²O was just an idea to bring knowledgeable workers into a club type format or what we soon discovered was Communities of Practice. Now X²O is simply the IP we have around how to be a Pod Leader and a Pod Member. That information is documented and available to clients. Podmatcher is the complimentary tool that Pod Leaders use to manage their groups and cross-pollenate.

Podmatcher was a collaborative effort of three people. Chris Bekas of Redshift Solutions, a very interesting man who manages to meld Astronomy, Lotus Notes Development and Music. I think gaming is in there somewhere. Next is Paul Avri, the Unix God who provided the platform of technology on which we built Podmatcher. Paul did anything asked of him in true Paul style. Then there was me. My job was everything else, non-technically, business, admin, ops and entrepreneurship.

We have achieved Podmatcher Beta Build 25 at this stage which is now going out to be trialled by the world. My job now is to sell it to corporates, government and venue owners. I also have to drive traffic to it to spawn users.

I think that it needs more work at the back end - when you spawn a pod, what you see in terms of info and what you get. We are sorting out the linking to podcasts and blogs.

The concept was that by providing a central node of information relating to a pod and its members, along with meeting times, venue and topic, users could match their interests with the appropriate knowledge network or Pod. The unique point of difference from other tools is that the central entity is the actual CoP or Pod rather than the individual member.

Users of PodMatcher are leaders and builders of CoP’s or, they are proactive networkers, utilising the PodMatcher tool to find, spawn and manage new Pods.

PodMatcher has a number of additional features, which make it attractive to users. This includes the embedding of a feature per Pod where PodCasts and Blogs may be linked to the Pod. This in effect allows the system to search and identify PodCasts and Blogs within the context of the pod rather than the individual. This minimises the hit or miss approach to cataloging PodCasts and Blogs in terms of the owners or originators subjective opinion. PodCasts in effect will be a result of a community rather than an individual, which gives them more credibility.

PodMatcher also includes a facility to ‘cluster’ pods. That means groups, or consortia can contextualise an area e.g. ‘Sports and Enterprise’ or ‘The Arts’ and include a number of Pods under that cluster.