Minti offers a collaborative parenting advice service that ignores the one-to-many we know best style service that is the norm in this space, and instead empowers individuals to share their stories and experience.

As Michael Arrington wrote his initial review of the site in March 2006, the overall concept of Minti isn’t entirely new. As a service it sits somewhere between an advice site such as BabyCentre (a site I visited regularly when I was on the road to parenthood) and a forum. The difference is in the implementation.

Weighing User Generated Interactions

Minti is powered by the Vibe Engine, a custom built CMS owned by Vibe Capital (the majority shareholders of Minti) that also powers sites such as Refurber.

Minti has over 20,000 active registered members (as opposed to inactive or casual visitors, they are doing 7 figures in traffic) who comment, vote, tag, and contribute advice. Consider something like Breastfeeding; Minti has many user generated advice articles on the subject but it’s how they are weighed that makes the service usable and perhaps something different.

The Vibe Engine weighs votes on an article based on a number of factors. Anyone can vote, but an unregistered visitor’s vote is not weighed as heavily as a registered user. Users themselves fall into ten member categories based on the amount of activity the undertake on Minti itself. Each level has a higher weighing meaning that users who are more active have a stronger vote than those who aren’t. It should be noted that none of this is evident to the user; these are all primarily backend levels, although at certain levels users get extra privileges including the ability to mark a contribution for review/ deletion is it is not of a reasonable standard. Users at higher levels also get to vote on reviews/ deletions as well in a truly distributed management model where regular users have ownership in decision making.

Overall the model delivers user rated results that serve to filter lots of information in a more accessible fashion for all readers.

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Refurber is a new social and reference website for the Do-It-Yourself crowd from Perth, Western Australia based Vibe Capital, makers of parenting site Minti.

On Refurber, users are able to share advice on a wide range of home improvement related topics. Content throughout the site is user generated with articles being tagged, rated and commented on by the greater community to encourage integrity and relevancy in the information created.

It’s a decent resource if DIY is your thing and the layout is well thought out and accessible.

The backend is the same as Minti; the “vibEngine” API powers both sites. The vibEngine platform is being licensed to other vertical sites in a move that sees Vibe evolve from site creator to solutions provide. The first licensed partner of vibEngine is the niche city focused site BuildingInLondon.com with further sites running vibEngine launching in the coming months.

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Minti is a collaborative advice site for parenting. Members write articles on parenting-type stuff (example) and other members rate the content, and add comments and tags. While search is not entirely driven through tags, you can browse by clicking on them and they do a good job showing related tags for a given article.

There are good reasons not to mention Minti and push traffic to it - it’s actually not doing anything feature wise that’s new and it’s another walled garden of content.

But I am going to mention it because it is well designed and built and has good features. It also may be useful to people who have or are planning to have children. Also, I like to see niche content sites spring up that use web 2.0 ideas - these services will help the masses start to use and understand things like tagging, ajax, etc.

And writing about Minti also gives me an opportunity to talk about user generated data and who exactly owns it.

This is another “walled-garden” solution - meaning the founders did all of the easy web 2.0 stuff - ajax, tagging, comments, etc. - but couldn’t make the hard choices when it came to site architecture and fell back on old web 1.0 ways of doing things. In this case, the easy decision was forcing people to write the content at the Minti site instead of aggregating it from the many blogs and other websties with content on parenting already out there on the web.

And you have to read the content on the Minti, too. No RSS feeds.

Visitors can also read all of the reviews written by a particular user. This is a good start because they’ve effectively set up a blog-like area for each user where all of their articles on parenting are aggregated (and have the nice Minti search engine attached to the blog). But again, without an RSS feed and the ability to syndicate out the content, Minti is telling its users that Minti owns the content that they write, not them.

Bottom line - this isn’t revolutionary and if you aren’t a parent you won’t find anything useful there to inspire you. But Minti could be a good resource for parents and maybe they’ll add the better ways to get data into and out of the service over time. Minti, if you are listening, I’d be happy to enter into a discussion with you on how I think you could accomplish that.

Minti is based in Australia and launched on March 8, 2006. They have raised A$1.6 million in seed financing.

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