Comments on: Neville Newey of muti responds: you just don’t get it!

By: Richard Catto

Richard Catto — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 01:36:18 +0000

Richard, that’s what Afrigator and Amatomu were made for

Sure, but I must go where the people are. I must make it as easy as possible for people to find my new content.

What makes you think that Muti is there to drive traffic to your site?

That’s the only thing I want from muti. If it doesn’t give me visitors, then it is worthless to me.

That is the ENTIRE DEAL, people.

By: Twylite

Twylite — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 15:12:27 +0000

Hi Richard,
What makes you think that Muti is there to drive traffic to your site? You have a supplier-centric view that says social bookmarking sites are for content providers to attract readers. Those sites, however, have a consumer-oriented view that says their content is whatever the readers find interesting (e.g. Muti: Muti is a social bookmarking site … dedicated to content of interest to Africans or those interested in Africa. — http://www.muti.co.za/about). If the users/consumers don’t find a particular article (or site) interesting they will mod it down.

By: stii.za.net » Blog Archive » Muti wars - a simple solution

stii.za.net » Blog Archive » Muti wars - a simple solution — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 11:17:51 +0000

[...] a rather senseless argument and there will always be those that is going to be unhappy by the state of affairs. Although Vince have a point about the Terms and Conditions and the possible prevention of creating [...]

By: Charl van Niekerk

Charl van Niekerk — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 11:04:02 +0000

Richard, that’s what Afrigator and Amatomu were made for. What do you think is the difference between those (aggregators) and Muti? The only difference would be that you had to post your links manually to Muti, and in the case of the other two, your posts are picked up from your Atom / RSS feed automatically. Muti is social bookmarking; the purpose (I thought) is clearly quite different from aggregators.

By: Richard Catto

Richard Catto — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 07:18:59 +0000

Charl, you have to submit each post you write individually wherever you wish it to be read.

People need to be told when there’s something new, they don’t have the ability to remember to go check a whole bunch of sites. Even RSS readers get neglected. I have Google Reader setup with a whole bunch of feeds – I check it quite infrequently.

People access social networking sites to see what’s new. So, you have to put your story there if you want it to be noticed.

That’s the whole deal.

By: Charl van Niekerk

Charl van Niekerk — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 20:34:04 +0000

@Richard: Again you speak of getting “repeat traffic”. This rather sounds like marketing. You claimed earlier that it’s not about marketing but about helping users to find your blog. I am honestly very confused now. Somewhere we need to pull the line between when it’s helping the users and helping yourself. There’s nothing wrong with helping yourself, as long as you help users in the process. Then everybody wins. However, when it starts to become an irritation to users, things change. Please note that I’m not saying you were irritating users, this is a general observation. This line is in the gray area and difficult to define, and probably largely depends on personal opinion.

By: Richard Catto

Richard Catto — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 11:05:44 +0000

I’m not sure what you mean, Guy.

My blog pings Google each time I update it and Google comes and crawls my site again, putting all my new content into its index so that people can find it when they do searches.

I also have the XML Sitemap Generator plugin for WordPress installed which generates a valid sitemap.xml file. Google uses that to more effectively crawl a blog. It’s basically a list of all the content that you want indexed. You can avoid duplicate entries by telling the plugin to construct a list of unique pages.

Google gives me 34% of my daily traffic. The rest, Jesus gives to me. Thank you, Jesus!

By: Guy McLaren

Guy McLaren — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 09:42:41 +0000

Funny how registering with Google will get you tons of traffic according to people like that even if you only post once on MUTI

By: Richard Catto

Richard Catto — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 05:36:12 +0000

Charl, there is no way that anyone can just post one link to their blog and get repeat traffic.

It simply does not work that way and will never.

By: Charl van Niekerk

Charl van Niekerk — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 23:29:04 +0000

(Sorry for two separate comments.)

@Richard: I can assure you that emotion is not necessary as I am not attempting to attack you in any way from my side. I would like to have a civilized, rational discussion about this.

The purpose of Atom / RSS feeds is to allow a user to easily subscribe to your blog and be notified of all your posts. This also goes for blog aggregators such as Afrigator and Amatomu (in alphabetical order). To me, the purpose of Muti is somewhat different (to showcase the crem-de-la-crem of the South African blogosphere). If a link to your blog is posted once and they visit it and are interested in receiving notification of all your future posts, they can simply subscribe. Now of course, that’s just my opinion, and I’m just a user of Muti like you, so there’s no reason why my opinion should be any more important than yours in any way. These are just the way I see things.

Your post apparently mislead me to think that it was about marketing and driving traffic to your blog but maybe I misinterpreted this – apologies if this is the case.