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?