MyScoop, South Africa’s youngest blog aggregator is celebrating the World Cup with its followers.

MyScoop is only a few months old and already it becoming one of the most popular blog aggregators available in South Africa, why you ask? Well to put it simply, MyScoop is inovative and listens to what it users want.

We have all seen popular social networking site Twitter adding to the World Cup spirit by introducing a whole section just dedicated to the World Cup and even Google is in on the action with its World Cup fixtures and schedules withing search results, well MyScoop has not dissapointed and has also introduced a whole section aimed towards the top World Cup news.

MyScoop owner, Nick Duncan, tweeted about it over the weekend and so I had to check it out. Apart from the nice big South African World Cup badge it is displaying, MyScoop now also features a dedicated popular articles section just based on World Cup keywords.

The new World Cup aggregation section keeps track of all the latest popular World Cup news and displays the top articles, go check it out at MyScoop and if you are a blogger why not sign up your blog.

First it was MyScoop and now Afrigator has also introduced real-time aggregation for blogs that support the PubSubHubbub functionality.

Stii software developer at Afrigator has just announced on his blog that real-time feed updates with PubSubHubbub has been implemented into Afrigator, but they still seem to have some issues with Blogger or Blogspot feeds.

For more info on the real-time aggregation of Afrigator feeds go check out Stii’s post.

MyScoop has lately been making big headways in the local blog aggregation scene, and today I am proud to announce yet another first for South African blog aggregators. Just a few days ago MyScoop was the first to offer real-time aggregation to bloggers and now its the first to keep track of user engagement on blogs.

User engagement is a term used to describe how much users interact with your articles through leaving comments. How does MyScoop calculate these top user engaged blogs? MyScoop runs through each and every registered blog every 168 hours (7 days) and check how many comments the articles has received that was written in the last 7 days. Once the comments has been calculate the number is divided by the amount of articles written and this will give you the user-engaged ratio.

As it currently stands the top 5 user-engaged blogs in South Africa are:

1. Pamorama: Marketing, life, social media
2. Nick Duncan
3. Erica Says
4. If these walls could talk v4.0
5. Harassed Mom

iGeek is currently sitting at number 11 on the list, you can view the list here.

Would just like to thank Nick again for this great new feature, sometimes its hard to believe that he is the one and only creator and developer of MyScoop.

Great news for local bloggers is that MyScoop the new up and coming local blog aggregator in South Africa has again beat the competition to it. Just a few days ago I wrote about PubSubHubbub that will enable real-time aggregation, and now I’m proud to say MyScoop has listened again.

MyScoop is now the first local blog aggregator that will aggregate local blogs in real time, no more waiting 20-30 minutes or logging in to you account and ping your blog for your article to be aggregated.

MyScoop has integrated the PubSubHubbub technology into their site and will now aggregate your articles in real-time. What does this mean you ask? Well to put it simply you can now get your articles submitted in real-time to the aggregator, and with MyScoop’s great SEO your articles will even rank higher faster.

How do you get access to this real-time aggregation you ask? Just follow these simple steps.

1. Register a account at MyScoop if you do not already have one, you can use your Twitter, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, OpenID or Blogger third party account if you do not wish to remember another password.
2. Your blog must either run from WordPress.com or must be a stand alone WordPress installation, WordPress.com users will not need to do anything further as their blog will already be integrated with PubSubHubbub.
3. If you have your own WordPress installation you will need to download a plugin to activate the real-time aggregation. Simply go to PubSubHubbub plugin page, download the plugin and install.
4. After installation simply activate the plugin and you should be ready to go. MyScoop will pick the plugin up in a few minutes or alternatively you can just ping your blog for the last time for MyScoop to pick up the changes.
5. You are now aggregated in real-time, enjoy!

Great new feature and thanks to Nick Duncan for staying up till wee hours of the morning to implement these changes.

MyScoop the latest addition to the South African blog aggregation and social bookmarking arena has again amazed me with its latest feature.

Nick Duncan the man behind MyScoop is constantly working on new features to make MyScoop South Africa’s best social bookmarking and blog aggregation tool, and its latest feature is site statistics straight to your inbox.

According to Nick there will be a setting in your MyScoop profile where you will be able to enable or disable the new feature as well as an option to receive statistics monthly or weekly.

The statistics mail contains stats such as your monthly rank overall and in your category, referrals sent through MyScoop to your blog, traffic statistics like visits and page views and a detailed view of how much traffic got sent through to what article on your blog.

Personally I think MyScoop is starting to give Afrigator and slowly dying Amatomu a run for their money when it comes to blog aggregation and social bookmarking. MyScoop already packs more features and nice to haves that Afrigator does not cater for, and every day I see more and more local bloggers joining MyScoop, even the big boys in South African blogging is starting to give it a try.

Whats your take on MyScoop?

MyScoop the new South African blog aggregator and social bookmarking site by Nicolas Duncan has built upon what the community requested.

MyScoop launched about a month ago with limited functionality just as Amatomu shut its doors. The blog aggregator started out with only functionality to fetch the latest blog entries from subscribed blogs and displaying it. Now things has changed and on track to provide the same functionality that Afrigator has to offer and Amatomu used to offer.

Nicolas Duncan has improved MyScoop allot during the last month and added a badge and ranking system. MyScoop now has the ability to keep track of your site hits and what pages users access on your blog. MyScoop also introduced a ranking system that keeps track of what blogs is most popular and what blog posts receives the most traffic, they also added a stats section to the control panel that shows you how many hits your site had on different dates.

The possibilities are endless now that MyScoop has the badge system in place and can gather all sorts of stats from your blog to display to you. What I would like to see is perhaps a Unique visits and Page views combined graph, and maybe one to display weekly, monthly and yearly stats.

Also perhaps Nicolas can provide us with some insight as to how the ranking of the blogs is calculated.

If you have any suggestions about features you would like to see on MyScoop, please leave a comment.

Amatomu a South African blog aggregator has been out of Alpha phase for two months now and still it is plagued with errors.

When Amatomu moved into Beta stage two months back you could have seen that the site has been improved with faster loading times, almost real time aggregation of blog posts just to name a few. Lately it has been a whole different story, with constant DB errors when visiting the site and even showing as logged in as ThoughtLeader who I am not.

Amatomu it’s time to step up and either fix your product or just take it of the market. I’m actually a fan of Amatomu as I like the layout of their site and the way they show whats hot currently in the blog sphere and rankings per category, but I’m getting really annoyed by the fact that the site is slow as hell when you try to access some features and aggregations that does not occur almost instantly but rather a few days after you posted your blog entry. Not to mention that I’m sometimes showing as logged in as another user.

A while back Christopher Mills owner of iMod launched a campaign to get bloggers to refrain from using Amatomu, I’m currently feeling the same vibe at the moment, maybe if all the bloggers just boycott Amatomu they will get their act together and start focusing on releasing a product that works. In the mean time if you are a sole user of Amatomu check out Afrigator, they are an example of how to run a aggregation service.