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.