Business and Blogging

New South African Blog Aggregator, Amatomu, and What The Name Means

by Des Walsh on April 3rd, 2007

Via The Editor’s Weblog, news that South Africa’s Mail & Guardian Online (M&G) has launched a blog aggregator for South African blogs, Amatomu.

The aggregator, still in Alpha, is well laid out, looks good and has some very useful features from a business blogging point of view, including tag clouds, a search for blogs (South African) and lists of top South African blogs, including Top 100, Top 500, Top 10 Business, Most Popular.

Tyler Reed has a good summary, billing the new aggregator as “South Africa’s Technorati“.

To check out the yield on business blogging, I used both the proffered list of Top 10 Business blogs and also the search box, searching simply on “business”. The search results were interesting rather than exciting (give them time) but working through some of the Top 10 Business listing was absorbing enough to basically wipe out a significant slice of my morning’s program.

Among a number of interesting sites I found through this distraction research was that for the recent SA Blog Awards 2007, with the memorably named cherryflava the winner in the best business blog category.

What really impressed me was that cherryflava and a number of the other SA business blogs have a real energy and rhythm in the writing and a nice combination of elegance and navigability in their design.

For anyone interested in the thinking and planning that went into the development of the new aggregator, Vincent Maher at his Media in Transition blog has provided a journaled account of the process. Including an explanation of the choice of name:

Amatomu, the name we eventually settled on, was hotly debated. The name means “reins” in isiZulu and I was a strong proponent of it because of the original desire to steer more mainstream traffic towards the blogosphere.

He and his colleagues were well aware of the possibility of the name being interpreted in a “sub-optimal” way:

Matthew was concerned that the name might imply some sort of punitive element but I managed to win that argument, only just, by explaining the difference between a crop, a bit and the reins (not that I know much about equestrian sports LOL).

For bloggers who want to help promote the service, there are some neat downloadable badges, presumably organised by a blogger because there is a range of colour combinations to choose from and they are of a size that fits neatly into a sidebar . 

Bloggers can also download some code to insert in their blogs to track traffic statistics, which include page impressions and unique visitors.

The launch is clearly not the end of the story. M&G Online say they are only 25% there and are already working on a regionally-categorized service for Africa.

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