I’ve been Amatomu’ed and Afrigator’ed

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Posted on 9 April 2007 Reviews South Africa Web 2.0

Both recently launched, Amatomu and Afrigator are 2 awesome sites. (BTW, what would you call them? Content aggregators? They both use RSS feeds, so blog aggregators?)

Amatomu

AmatomuBeing the older of the 2, Amatomu is becoming a daily stop for me. I love reading what South African’s are chatting about and having the latest posts and a zeitgeist that tracks whats keywords are currently hot. Also their admin panel has a really sweet flashy stats engine, that tracks whats cooking on your blogs.

One thing I would like to see is a favourites section. This way not only will you be able to see the top 100 blogs by hits / uniques whatever it is, you will be able to see which blogs have been favourited the most by users. Very much like Technorati’s Top Favorited Blogs. Stats, stats, stats – we just can’t get enough of them, can we? ;-)

Afrigator

AfrigatorAfrigator is very much in its infancy. Signing up was easy enough, but once I had the tracking code, I had no idea what to do next. I closed the AJAX popup panel and I was back to where I started. Slightly confusing…

I then logged in, and went straight to the stats page and found there were numbers already displaying which shouldn’t have happened as I hadn’t even put the code on my site yet!

You can see that Afrigator is very much in Alpha, but it has great potential. One thing I’m sure everyone would like to see is the ability to add multiple blogs on one account. I really don’t want to sign up for multiple accounts.

A feature I’m trying to decide if I like or not is being able to read the blog posts directly in Afrigator. Clicking on the headline of the post opens up the entire blog post for you to read. This may be awesome to some, I’m thinking from a SEO standpoint, it could be flagged as duplicate content, or even worse I could be flagged! Not just duplicate content flagging, my very own content is being displayed on another site! Any thoughts? Maybe offering an excerpt would be a better option.

I just discovered this while playing around, Afrigator also have a top sites section! I wonder what it’s based on? Everyone loves getting near the top, whether its your latest tetris score or your blog being ranked number one on Afrigator or Amatomu. :-)

One small thing, please add a tooltip to the country flags displayed alongside the posts. ;-)

Final Thoughts

If you run a blog, you don’t really have an excuse not to sign up for both services. Connecting your blog with others is what blogging is all about. Both Amatomu and Afrigator have some work to be done, but from what they term “Alpha”, I can’t wait to see what these sites will grow into in the future.

  • http://www.matthewbuckland.com matthew buckland

    Hi Jason…thanks for your post. re: your favourite request… that is a feature which we’ll rollout hopefully this week if it passes testing… let us know if amatomu has been sending traffic to yr blogs — that is the whole point of it for us — to send traffic to blogosphere…. thanks for your support. matt

  • http://www.jasonbagley.com Jason

    Hi Matthew, cool stuff! I’m looking forward to the favourites section. ;-)

    With regards to traffic, I don’t blog to often, but I have had quite a number of referrers coming from Amatomu, so it seems to be working. Awesome.

  • http://justinhartman.com Justin Hartman

    Hi Jason

    Glad to have you on board mate. We do have a lot of work to do and there is much to come in the coming weeks so watch mine and Mike Stopforth’s blog for more info. If you need anything, have a suggestion or want to complain then do it to me via email :)

  • http://www.jasonbagley.com Jason

    Thanks Justin, I’m keeping a keen eye on it.

  • http://eishcoza.blogspot.com Eishman

    Add http://www.muti.co.za into the mix and we suddenly have a vibrant SA blogosphere! The future is looking good.

  • Chris M

    Seems like everyone it getting “Amatomu’ed and Afrigator’ed” – It’s a great network, glad to see you onboard.

    Thanks for visiting my site :)

  • http://www.vincentmaher.com Vincent Maher

    Hi Jason,

    You must be clairvoyant re the favourites because we were thinking the same thing exactly. We were thinking less in terms of charts and more in terms of being able to have a panel that moves a little slower than the what’s new section.

  • http://www.jasonbagley.com Jason

    @Chris M – Great stuff.. I love poking around and seeing what and where people appear on the web. ;-)

    @Vincent Mahar – clairvoyent eh? I’ll see what else I can dream up… I mean predict. ;-) Keep up the great work over at Amatomu. It is seriously rocking!

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  • http://google.com/ Kenya Shellenbarger

    This one makes sence “One’s first step in wisdom is to kuesstion everything – and one’s last is to come to terms with everything.”

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