Once South Africa's premier blog aggregator Amatomu has been slowly losing popularity with both content creators and readers.

It seems that things have finally died as evidenced by the following message currently been displayed.














Arg! It's broken indeed!

It's a pity as although we still have Afrigator, this has a more African focus as opposed to South African focus. Fortunately this project has not dropped the ball, let's hope it stays that way.

Labels: afrigator, amatomu, blogs

Posted by eishman at 12:06 PM | Permalink | Comments

I received the following communication from the Amagama team today.

It would be interesting to know if this is due to what could be perceived as a slow purge of the online M&G interests or, as the communication states, a combination of low usage and spam blogs.

M&G were for a long time (in web terms) the leaders in the South African web 2.0 space but of late there properties have been under fire for there lack of direction since key players left the team, Amatomu being a case in point.

Labels: amagama, amatomu, mail and guardian

Posted by roygbiv at 2:43 PM | Permalink | Comments

They have been sorting SA's blogosphere for sometime now but Amatomu has been getting some flak from local bloggers of late.

Now I see they are sending SA Bloggers to New Zealand! That ought to kill off their membership!

Labels: amatomu

Posted by roygbiv at 3:22 PM | Permalink | Comments

The guys at Amatomu have added some new functionality, that has been will make for interesting changes in their top lists.

They are now offering a button that can be added to individual posts ala Digg, a feature suggested here just over a month ago. (See : Helping readers Schmaak Eish!!) This makes it easy for the ordinary user to simply click and 'Schmaak.'
So what exactly is a 'Schmaak?' Will for those overseas readers, this is a South Africanism for 'really like a lot.' It is simply a way for you to vote for a blog post you enjoyed. It will help others to find the post and blog in question as it climbs in the rating.

Hey, give it a go, click on the button below ... no seriously click ... don't be shy ... click dammit!!

(Edit : So the post was published, but not button. Oops, maybe we aren't quite there yet? Better find out from Vincent & Matthew what the problem may be. Sorry for getting your hopes up, still that means you will have to return to shmaak another day!!)

Labels: amatomu, eish, schmaak

Posted by eishman at 9:23 AM | Permalink | Comments

I decided to take a day off from posting. Just to give you a little insight as to how Eish works, I usually collate and type my content at night. I then post later the next morning, from work.
The lack of sleep was catching up on me, so I decided that a night off was a good idea. So you were not supposed to be getting your Eish!! fix today.

However when I arrived in the office this morning and did my usual morning Amatomu browse through I noticed that one of the top searches was for 'schmaak.php.' It immediately struck a cord, because I had done a similar search a few weeks ago. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to add a little script to your posts that would make it easy for the readers to click-and-schmaak? I not capable of coming up with such a thing, but did come up with a rather ugly tedious work-around, but I am sure that there are some very bright okes & okesses that could zap up and simple solution rather quickly.
Any takers?

Labels: amatomu, eish

Posted by eishman at 9:05 AM | Permalink | Comments

Being interested to find Australasian comment on the Super 14 results this weekend, I set out to find the New Zealand equivalent of Amatomu, Muti and Afrigator. Ie. a blog aggregator specifically meant for New Zealand-centric content.
Seems like while our rugby teams managed to overpower the Blues & Crusaders, our blog gurus have totally annihilated their New Zealand counterparts. The best I could find was a stuff.co.nz , not even an aggregator.
So I moved on. Why not see what the Australians are saying about the rugby. Could be interesting. My list of Aussie publications I scan were way to 'factual.' I watched the games, I know what happened. I wanted some opinions. Again the search for a blog aggregator! This is what I found (Aussies reading this please feel free to correct me and send me links, but a Google search from "Australian Blog Aggregator" should suffice.) www.news2.com.au, www.buggerall.com.au & www.gnoos.com.au.

News2.com.au - besides an extremely nauseating frontpage ad for BuggerAll, it's uninspiring look and feel really did not prompt me to want to delve into what it had to offer. It really didn't seem like there was much anyways. A tag cloud exactly like the one found in this blog on the right highlights 'YOUR' as being the most used 'tag' and they advertise that they update every 30 minutes!

Labels: afrigator, amatomu, eish, muti

Posted by eishman at 9:54 AM | Permalink | Comments

So, today is a nice slow day. Slap bang in the middle of what most people have made into a mega-long weekend.
I have noticed however that there are a few hardcore bloggers still posting and reading the blogs. (MyBlogLog is a whole lot cooler than I thought it would be)

So I thought I would take the gap, and ask some advice. But before I do let me warn those of you non-bloggers that this is not going to interest you. I am not a fan about blogging about blogging for the sake of blogging (and Amatomu rankings) so non-bloggers do yourself a favour and click here.

So, fellow, bloggers, here's my question. While I have readers from all over the world, I would like my main audience to be South African. Either those currently staying here in SA, those currently working elsewhere in the world, or ex-pats. I feel it's important to aim at a target market and not get drawn into trying to compete with the international bloggers. It will also allow me to pitch the blog to advertisers one day, should I decide to do so.
With this in mind, Amatomu becomes a very important tool. It's local focus means that the majority of the referrals coming from this portal are going to be local readers.
Thus the "Latest Posts" column offered by Amatomu on it's opening page becomes vitally important. This is the first thing casual surfers are going to use as a reference and it's an important leveler needed by the smaller blogs as the exposure they get is exactly the same as
the 'bigger' blogs.
When I first signed up with Amatomu they accepted your blog posting time as gospel. I found this out is my Blogger timezone was out of synch and I found myself sitting on top for hours with a post time way in the future. (Sorry, Vince & Matt) I eventually got that right, but others had cottoned on by then and took advantage of the loophole. Fortunately, they have sorted this out by assigning a random time if you post with a time that is in the future.
Now, my question. How do you ensure that you get the current time as the time posted? I have found that very often, despite constant pinging, it will take 20mins before a post will show up in the "Latest Posts" lists. By that time you are already way down the list. Clearly some of you have figured out how to get it right, so please share. I tried setting my time 15mins ahead, but that just got me penalised as it went through after 10mins and I landed up 3/4s of the way down the list anyways.
Help!

Labels: amatomu, blogs, eish

Posted by eishman at 1:40 PM | Permalink | Comments

Things are hotting up in the SA blogosphere!

The 2007 Blog awards were held on Friday, Amatomu has pretty much launched itself into public alpha (see Monday's post), Muti arrives and then Afrigator is launched.
Read Gino Cosme's post today for an interesting take on the Benefit of two social media aggregators for business.

Now Amatomu has already launched an upgraded feature, and it's really cool. Those of you even remotely interested in all things online have to give this a look. Go to amatomu.com and click in the 'Trends' tab. The have some really cool charts for "Total page views", "Post per day", "Category breakdown" etc. As a blogger they have also added like graphs particular to your blog.

Very cool guys, I like where this is leading.

I know you read these posts, so here's my suggestion. How about a graph tracking the blogs daily ratings?

Labels: afrigator, amatomu, muti

Posted by eishman at 5:54 PM | Permalink | Comments

Sunday's April Fool's story has caused some major excitement in EishLand! The story made it to the top "hot" spot at the www.muti.co.za and this in turn pushed up eishcoza.blogspot.com to 34th position in the www.amatomu.com top 500 blog list.

So in return for the increased traffic, I reckoned I would pay them back with a little featurette on these two fully fledged South African web services that I can guarantee will make your blog travels a whole lot more interesting.

Amatomu
It's has easy to navigate tabs which start with a 'full' top 500 listing (that oddly stops at 200!?). But then you can check through the top blogs by traffic for the past 24 hours, 7 days & month. The same can be done for each of the categories. It has a sidebar which lists new postings from registered blogs as they are posted. There is also a column for newest blogs and a "Zeitgeist" widget which displays most popular topics being blogged on the SA blogosphere.
As a blogger it's simple to register and as the rankings are calculated on actual traffic figures it's a fun way to keep tabs of visitor numbers in relation to fellow SA bloggers.

Muti
"An aggregator or news aggregator or feed reader is a client software that uses web feed to retrieve syndicated web content such as weblogs, podcasts, vlogs, and mainstream mass media website" : Wikipedia.

www.muti.co.za is an web based aggregator specifically serving postings originating from Africa.
Inspired by social bookmarking sites like digg.com and reddit.com, Muti allows registered users to submit stories they wish to share and others to then vote on the submitted stories. Those voted then move up and down the lists depending on the number of votes it gets. It gets a little more interesting in that you can also vote a story 'down' if you think it it's current score is underserved.
The submittor can then earn kudus, a word play on kudos, for their submissions and they too can be rated as good sources for news.
The user interface leaves a lot to be desired, but the concept has been tried and proven. A South African spin is necessary and welcomed. With continued development this could and should grow to become a major player in the SA Web 2.o market.
Take a look, register, see whats new and, of course, submit and/or vote for the latest story at eishcoza.blogspot.com!

Labels: amatomu, blogs, muti, ratings, technorati

Posted by eishman at 7:51 PM | Permalink | Comments