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Muti.co.za & Censoring

There has been a lot of posts the last few days again about censorship on Muti.

One of the things I personally like about Muti is that the signal-to-noise ratio is much better than the "big" international sites. I get notified via Jabber and IRC every time somebody posts a link. Because of the multiple syndication methods, I spend time looking at each link. I don't mind browsing through links to quality content (although I might not read all of the actual content myself) because at least it isn't a waste of my time. This counts even if the link is posted by the author. However, I do not appreciate the author posting a link to every single post he writes. Some of the posts on my blog might be interesting, but most of them do not deserve to be posted to Muti. Muti is about the crem-de-la-crem to me. If I find a blog through Muti (or whichever means) and I really like it, I'll subscribe to the blog's individual Atom or RSS feed to stay current with all the posts. Syndication sites such as Afrigator and Amatomu (in alphabetical order) are there for syndicating all the posts. If every author posted all his own stuff, what would make Muti different than these?

On the bigger sites, there are thousands of posts every single day. Nobody wants to look through all of them; individuals normally only follow specific categories, tags, or a combination of them and vote up whatever they like. Muti only gets a couple of dozen links per day, so posting a link is considered by many to be much more "major" than on the other sites.

By this I am not accusing anybody of anything. I would just really like to see responsible use of such a great online social website.

Update: Vincent Maher wrote a very good objective post about this issue that is very-much worth reading in my opinion. I also commented just now. I do think that his reply that my comment on Richard's post was blatantly false is a little unjustified though.

Posted by Charl van Niekerk on Friday, October 19, 2007
Get TimesURL

2 Comments

Comment by Anonymous Neville Newey on Saturday, October 20, 2007 2:47:00 PM

Good observations Charl. The way you use muti is exactly the way it is intended to be used by design. There seems to be a misconception that muti and its brethren are designed for the sole pupose of increasing traffic to a site or for getting it indexed by Google. While this may in some cases work, this is not muti and co were primarily intended for. So now we have to find a way to strike a balance as you suggest between these two very different uses. These two uses are also diametrically opposed in that the more muti is used for the one, the less useful it is for the other. An interesting challenge!

Regards

Comment by Blogger Charl van Niekerk on Saturday, October 20, 2007 8:37:00 PM

Hi Neville,

Pulling this line is indeed very difficult as it's clearly in the "gray area" and largely depends on personal opinion. Best of luck on getting this issue sorted; hopefully we can stop this silly back-and-forth fighting in the South African blogosphere soon.

Kind Regards,
Charl

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