I've just listened to Mike and Dave interview Neville Newey on Amplitude about his social bookmarking site www.Muti.co.za. Inspired by legendary social bookmarking sites like Digg, Muti is aiming to be the South African equivalent that punts African and South African content. One of the first questions that came to mind was Why the name? Muti? In South African culture, muti has two meanings, one relatively formal and another that is driven by perception. In the formal sense muti is the term for traditional medicine in South Africa. In the perception sense, muti has been linked with murder and mutilation in stories of "muti killings" where sangomas (traditional doctors) have harvested human body parts for the composition of certain remedies (mutis).
Having listened to Neville, and having checked out the site, it is not clear to me why he has chosen this hot-potato of a name. It seems fairly random - except for the African link - and careless. Without a tenable link between the name of the tool and what it does, I find it hard to figure out why it exists. It needs a plot. When it comes to sites like Digg, the name is self-explanatory - you vote for a story based on how much you digg it (colloquial for "how much you like it"). But with muti, what is the plot? Having looked at the content, besides the African content theme, there is little else that provides coherence for the stories that are muti'd. What is the rationale for voting for a story besides just trying to create exposure around it?
Admittedly, I'm a novice in this space. Perhaps there's something I'm missing?
I must firstly say that I love Muti and think they are doing great things. Supporting SA content is a brilliant and necessary concept.
However, when I first got wind of muti i had to actually ignore the name to make use of it. Now I am used to it and it doesn't phase me at all, but I think there could've been a better name relating to Africa.
Hi Aiden
I would like to explain to you the reasoning behind the choice of the name "muti" as it was taken with a lot of care and consideration and was certainly not a random, or careless choice as you suggest.
Firstly I wanted to convey the idea of something that you come to daily for your fix of news. Note that the link with murder and mutilation is a recent link created by overhyped media and and many africans associatite muti with the other more affectionate meaning ie that of a herbal or even a non herbal medicince that has a soothing or heeling effect. Secondly, I wanted a name that was uniquely southern African (it is not only a South African term, and note that muti is NOT a South African web site) that was instantly recognizeable by all Southern Africans. The term muti, although generally considered a zulu word, is used by all language groups including english and afrikaans. Thirdly it had to be a short name, preferably one or two syllables so that it is easy to remember and easy to type. Fourthly it had to be a word that had a phonetic spelling, again for ease of typing.
And finally, it had to be available as a domain name. Sadly muti.com was taken, muti.org is for sale but beyond my budget so I settled on muti.co.za.
So I hope you can see from all of the above reasons, that very much care was taken in the choice of the name.
regards
Neville Newey
Nic, Neville, thanks for your comments. Apologies for taking so long to get them published - I've had some technical pains on the admin side of the site.
Neville, your explanation is helpful in terms of the thinking that has gone into the naming of the site. I guess my post, and often my concern, is with the narrative pulse of the country. At any one time that pulse is informed by the discourses taking place within our society at that point. So, as muti grows in stature, I wanted to address how some people may respond to the name within the context of the discourse around muti currently playing out in the nations consciousness. It was my first response (and Nic's as well).
What would be helpful in moving beyond this initial perception, is a clear message (in addition to the rationale you have already given) of how the name and the process of voting for stories is linked (if at all?). You see, you're facilitating the broadcasting of stories with muti - by virtue of that, you have my buy-in (so don't hear what I'm not saying in my initial post). My question then as a user is, "How do I decide on what stories to a) add to muti, and b) how do I decide on what stories to vote for. This is what I mean by suggesting that muti have a plot. If your intention for muti was to have users use it in a random fashion to let whatever stories are worthy of mention to be broadcasted, that's fine.
Hi again Aiden
You are quite correct in that I have been somewhat vague in the about page of muti. I really need to rewrite that and try to answer the questions you have.
One very incorrect assumption I made was that people are already very familiar with the Digg and Reddit models, and that they would immediately understand the dynamics of the site. While perhaps true of techie bloggers, I have found that most people are not familiar with the way these sites work.
Thanks for putting the questions down so succinctly.
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