What is MyScoop, Afrigator and Amatomu you ask? They are currently the top social media blog aggregators available in South Africa. A Blog aggregator is a website that monitors all kinds of online blogs and then posts the articles to a central location for other web users to explore.
Blog aggregators does not only just collect these articles from blogs, they also do all kinds of fancy stuff working out what articles is popular amongst  users, collects statistics about the blogs and even rank them amongst each other.
For long the two major blog aggregators in South Africa has been Amatomu and Afrigator but that changed at the end of last year when Amatomu kind of closed down and that opened up the market for another entrant called MyScoop. Since then Amatomu has reopened their site but are still experiencing lots of issues.
Amatomu used to be one of my favourite blog aggregators due to the fact that they collect very useful information regarding your blog, but as their popularity grew their system could just not keep up with the demand and started to brake down on a daily basis. This is when I decided I had enough as these breakdowns caused increased loading times on my blog and I removed my Amatomu badge.
Afrigator has been doing well in the blog aggregator arena, and I am glad for them. The Afrigator team also launched a blog advertising platform called AdGator aimed at bloggers and this is where I think their attention shifted away from Afrigator leaving it a bit out dated to the other two blog aggregators. Afrigator also added a twitter like service called Gatorpeeps aiming at integrating blog aggregation with social networking, I liked Gatorpeeps at first but soon lost interest as twitter was way more active.
Afrigator lacks certain functionality that the other aggregtors has and that is the functionality to view more detailed statistics about your blog, things like a detailed visitor breakdown displaying IP’s perhaps next to the articles the visitors are viewing. Afrigator also uses a unique way of ranking blogs, they take a combination of unique visitors plus unique views plus links from other blogs and then they do some fancy calculations to obtain the blogs overall rank. These ranks also gets reset every Sunday and recalculated, so its not just a matter of who gets the most visitors has the most popular blog.
Afrigator does not only track blogs but they also aggregate videos, photos and news articles. They are also not just aimed at the local market but the African market tracking a total of more that 4000 blogs currently.
MyScoop is the latest addition to the South African blog aggregator arena, MyScoop is the brain child of Nick Duncan and has been running from November 2009 and in its 4 month of existence its already tracking more than 175 South African blogs. What makes MyScoop so unique to me is that its a project of 1 man and not that of a company, and already I find it more useful and stable than some of the other blog aggregators out there.
Since the launch of MyScoop back in November 2009, the site has seen many changes, and just recently undergone a whole face lift with some new nice features. What I like about MyScoop is the fact that Nick listens to what his users want and always welcomes suggestions on new features, think of it as a community by the community. There is some nice features lined up that includes an interactive blogs section, more detailed blog statistics, a overall blogsphere stats section as well as widgets and gadgets for your blog.
If you are a blogger and would like to get your content out there I would suggest your subscribe to one if not all of these aggregators, the more exposure your site gets the more traffic you receive and that is what you as a blogger wants.
Keep an eye out for MyScoop as I think it has the potential of becoming one of the top blog aggregators in South Africa.
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Thanks for the great comments Gerhard, its posts like these that keep me going..!
No problem Nick, I really like what you are doing with MyScoop and have high hopes for it.
I can relate to Nick responding well to his website’s users. Almost every suggestion I have thrown his way seems to be up and running the very next day!
Big-ups to Nick. He is doing a fantastic job. And Afrigator could always use the competition
To be honest, my favourite out of the bunch is myScoop. Afrigator is extremely slow sometimes that i give up and amatomu, well what can I say more.
Just wanted to add my props & kudos to the collection for Nick and MyScoop. I was hugely impressed when I first joined MyScoop and then doubly do when I discovered that the “MyScoop Team” was just Nick himself.
The recent update is phenomenal Nick!
Our experience on Amatomu exactly mirrors yours, Gerhard.
And whilst we really like the Afrigator guys and the system, we are also starting to find that it is slowing things down on the blog. So much so that I removed the badge for a couple of days recently. Glad to say that things seem back to normal at the moment, and I’m hoping it was a short lived glitch and not a sign of things to come?
Thanks for the great summary of the aggregators Gerhard.
@Greg thanks for the great comments, much appreciated!
MyScoop takes the cake hands down. Afrigator and Amatomu are dead in the water, servers are always down and they are far too slow. Myscoop has a better ranking system in my opinion too.