Why do you use Muti?

Some interesting questions were asked this weekend. So I guess the correct question should be: “Why do you Muti?” Is it solely to drive traffic to your site? If that is the main reason then you are doing it for all the wrong reasons, since it is bad mutiquette to Muti your own content. So if it is not to drive traffic, why do you Muti?

Is right reason to see what others find interesting? Although a good and noble reason, I don’t think its a good enough reason since not many people find stuff I’m interested in interesting. We’ve all seen why Digg has become the center of social bookmarking rants and we should really be careful of this not happening to our local favorite.

How can we prevent this from happening? Lots have been said about Technorati and how crappy it has become, but there are lots of great features that could potentially make Muti great! Two features I love is 1) Watchlists and 2) Tagged feeds.

1) Watchlists works as follows: You specify a keyword or a URL and that gets saved with your profile so you can visit your watchlists and it should show you the latest results tagged with your specified keywords or the latest submissions by the specified URL. All it really is is a saved search on specific tags (or URLs). A simple concept, yet not often implemented.

2) Tagged feeds: You search for specific tags and can RSS feed them to your favorite feed reader for the exact same reasons as watchlists.

This would ensure that I get relevant content that would be to my liking. I’m not into politics at all. I do not necessarily want to see political submissions. I can filter it out by setting up technology specific whatchlists which is to my liking. This might make the adoption of Muti go a lot faster, since newcomers might visit Muti once and see nothing of interest to them there and leave only to never return!

Another benefit this could hold is to filter out spam. Tyler had a f’king great idea to tag spam submissions with the tag “spam” so it can be identified. Now tag “spam” is too general, since I might submit something related to spam and tag it likewise. What can be done is to tag it with “mutispam” and set up a watch that would never show me submissions tagged with “mutispam”. Great idea, but what if some asshole go and tag everything but his own posts with mutispam? So the plan is not foolproof. (As Tresblue loves to quote: “If you think your plan is foolproof you have seriously underestimated the ingeniuty of fools!“) We need to find a way to work around it and find a suitable solution.

The bigger Muti gets the more we will run into some new obstacles. Its how we are going to overcome those obstacles that will determine the success of Muti. And knowing Neville, he will always be open for suggestions.

PS: Kudus to Google for their Cricket World Cup logo!!

technorati tags:muti.co.za, digg, technorati, tagging, rssfeeds

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One Comment to "Why do you use Muti?"

• Imel’s Web — Is AMATOMU the answer? said: On 03/20/2007 at 7:20 pm

  [...] I like the idea of organizing and categorizing (filtering) blogs, as I find sites like Muti (sorry Stii) a bit confusing and cluttered. Share [...]

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Filed in: Techie stuff, ideas 2.0, muti.co.za by: Stii