Neville Newey is the creator of two sites called Muti and NewsMap. Muti is a community moderated news site about Africa; it's a memedigger like Digg or Reddit, but focused on Africa news. NewsMap is a site that displays the newest news stories about any geographic location you click on a world map. It's a mashup of Yahoo News and Google Maps with a focus on Africa as well.

In the following interview Neville and I talked about information overload and organization, mashups and Africa.

Marshall:

Can you begin by telling our readers a little bit about yourself?

Neville:

First, I would like to thank you for inviting me to talk about my sites and web innovation in general. It is an honor to take part in this interview.

I was born and grew up in South Africa and have lived in Botswana and the D.C. area before moving to the Bay area where I have now made my home. I am a big fan of technology especially in its application to improve people's lives, for pure entertainment or for more practical purposes.

I am a 'programmer' by trade, making a living as an independent contractor, most recently on US government projects. I use the word 'programmer' rather loosely here and like many in the tech industry, I perform a variety of other unidentifiable tasks. My wife once referred to it as 'The Secret World of IT'!

Marshall:

What inspired the development of Muti and Newsmap? What were some of the guiding principles in their development?

Neville:

Reddit.com. In the early days of Reddit, clones were popping up almost weekly. This is a real testament to the brilliance of the guys behind Reddit; if others are trying to emulate your work, it means you have done something right. I don't believe there is a single programmer who does not have a secret desire to program a Reddit clone! So, seeing all these clones made me want to create one as well. But the practical side of me kept saying that I could not justify the time away from paying work to do this. However, one day, reading Reddit, I saw that a fellow South African had said he would love to see an African version of Reddit. That was the catalyst that got me to create Muti; I started coding it immediately!

Newsmap came about in a completely different way. To be honest, Muti has not yet attracted a large membership. This led me to really think about what makes a site useful. If you look at Digg.com, Reddit, and many of the other clones, they are really all about organizing information; or in other words, they are tools to sift quickly through the huge amount of information being generated daily. So I tried to think of an intuitive and simple way to categorize data, and having lived in a number of different places, a natural categorization to me seemed to be geographical. So I came up with the idea to marry geographic location to information. A map has an almost infinite number of clickable points, which can all represent a search term, so it is a very efficient two-dimensional 'menu,' if you like.

The original idea for Newsmap (called 'News Trail') was to try and map two or more related countries based on their mention in a story, thus creating a 'trail' around the globe. Like most ideas, when you start to implement them they change, and News Trail ended up being the far simpler Newsmap. Simpler is almost always better!

Marshall:

What does the future look like in terms of specific communities of interest adopting the kind of technology that was popularized in the tech community by digg?

Neville:

Muti really was an experiment in making a Reddit-like site for a specific community, Africa. It has led to my involvement in the up-and-coming Zangu project, initiated by Erik Hersman. (see http://whiteafrican.com/?p=193) The Zangu project will try to build on some of the current ideas and we believe it will change the way that Africans use the internet.

Marshall:

Could you share some thoughts on mashups from your perspective? Are the conditions required to foster innovation present, what could be improved?

Neville:

There is room for improvement though. The whole 'AJAX' landscape is still very much in its infancy and there are still some technical details to work out. A number of javascript libraries have also emerged in recent years, but in general javascript coding for the browser is still a fragile and hostile environment. For example, there is a lack of mature, reliable javascript debuggers and IDEs. What's really important, moving forwards, is that we don't have another 'browser war', or more generically, another 'standards war' where large companies try to further their own interests and in the process stifle innovation.

Neville Newey is the creator of Muti and NewsMap, two community news sites focused on Africa.