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.

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.

Just last night I wrote about Amatomu closing down until Mail & Guardian finds a new buyer for the product. And now upon the closing down of Amatomu a new South African Blog Aggregator has surfaced.

MyScoop is the latest addition to the South African Blog Aggregator familly. Although I alway welcome competition MyScoop is rather limited when it comes to functionality.

A great thing I noticed upon signing up was that I could make use of my Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, OpenID or Blogger accounts to sign in with. Another nice thing about MyScoop is that fact that I do not need to install a badge of any kind, this may be needed for some nice functionality, it looks like MyScoop periodically fetched rss feeds and adds new posts when they appear in the latest fetch.

Now I did say it is rather limited, and here is why. Too put it simply MyScoop only displays latest posts from the blogs it crawls, this is due to the fact that is does not make use of a badge on your site. It would be nice to have some stats about your site and a ranking system. Another nice thing that is missing is adding categories, would be nice to be able to add you blog to a certain category, and even be able to view blogs of only certain categories.

I would say it is a good start for now, but to keep up with the competition the guys from MyScoop will need to add some of the functionality Amatomu had and Afrigator currently utilise.

Good luck to the guys at MyScoop and hope you guys make a success of the site.

Some of you may remember that a while back I wrote about the consistent errors Amatomu is giving allot of us. Well after I wanted to rant again yesterday about how I now get greeted with the silly database error everytime I visit the site, I have seen that Amatomu finnaly confessed.

After visiting Amatomu just a while ago, the smerky database error page that made you the end user thought that you broke the site has now been replaced with a message stating that amatomu has reached its end at the Mail & Gardian.

Firstly, apologies for not communicating sooner about the site’s downtime. We were hoping to fix it sooner.

Amatomu has become too expensive for us to maintain and run, as it brings very little revenue, and bears a prohibitive cost for a company whose main product is news.

However, it’s obviously a great little product, and one that deserves to survive. To this end, we’ve offered it to a couple of interested parties. If we have no joy there, we’ll be offering it to the community to run as a community-based service.

Please bear with us as we fix it, and as we go through the process of transferring ownership. We will have clarity within the next five days.

Jason

Technical Manager

Mail & Guardian

Good luck to whoever buys Amatomu, I personaly think that it is a great service and can be changed to become profitable, specialy since there is so much interest in the site. Take Afrigator as an example, surely they are not running their blog aggregator at a los. I will be a firm supporter of Amatomu as soon as all the bugs get ironed out again and is stable enough.

Maybe a few of us web junkies should try and further Amatomu as a Community Project.

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.

In my previous post I discovered that Amatomu was in the process of upgrading to beta version, so here is the official statement of what is happening and what happened.

It’s bad news, good news and better news for Amatomu users. Let’s start with the bad news first.

We dropped a lot of hits over the past two weeks due to some hefty fiddling on the back end of the site. These hits will not be coming back, and they have affected rankings. If you’re missing hits, we sincerely apologise.

The good news is that hits are once again being accurately recorded – more accurately than ever before – and the rankings have restored to normal.

The better news for our bloggers is the reason behind the fiddling. We’ve been hard at work, rebuilding Amatomu from the ground up. You may have noticed in the past that Amatomu wasn’t the fastest site on the Internet, even with 60 minute cache times and a dedicated server.

So we’ve rebuilt it on CodeIgniter (which is what we use for mg.co.za), and spent sleepless nights pouring over every technical aspect of Amatomu. No Sql query went unoptimised. We’ve moved servers and Amatomu is now spread between Afrihost’s dedicated box and shared space with a new M&G virtual server sitting on IS architecture.

The performance differences are staggering. Before, we had to cache for up to an hour to keep Amatomu up at all. We’ve now dropped caching, and are serving live data. If you refresh your page you’ll see things change.

We also used to process the stats in batches. That meant you could only see stats that were at best three hours old, and some that were a day or more old. Now, all stats tracking is live. If you’re on your stats page, click refresh to watch your hit counters go up.

We’ve done a lot of work to ensure that the stats are more accurate than before. You’ll see a closer correlation between Amatomu and server-side stats.

We’re also much more aggressive at fetching your RSS feeds. We used to only be able to get to each feed once a day. Now, we’re fetching them all in just over an hour. That means you won’t have to sit around waiting for your post to pop up on Amatomu.

We’ve also given you the ability to tell Amatomu to go fetch your RSS feed, and we’ll tell you if we’re having a problem getting your feed.

There are a few other subtle improvements – you can retrieve lost passwords (finally), and we’ve changed the tagging system so that you can drill down to people or companies. Logging a hit is down to around 300ms – that means there’s very little speed impact on your blog. And we’ve officially changed from “Alpha” to “Beta” phase.

We’ve also aggressively culled some blogs from the site. Sorry if one of them was yours, but please have a look at the T&C’s as we’re going to be a lot stricter about these.

The best thing about the new platform is that it gives us a lot more freedom to innovate and add new features going forward. Let us know what you’d like to see in the future, and any bugs you find on the Beta.

Kind regards
The Amatomu Team

This from Amatomu

Amatomu one of South Africa’s blog aggregators has just been taken out of Alpha phase to Beta.

I spotted this just a few minutes ago after checking some stats and suddenly getting a error page. Maybe this can contribute to the fact that my blogs have been losing some ranking due to the fact that the rss feeds haven’t been updating, some even behind with as much as 4 days.

Amatomu is not my favourite blog aggregator due to the fact that it has allot of issues with the site and at times speed is slow making pages load forever. Afrigator on the other hand has a more better algorithm for sorting blog ranks.

I must still investigate whats new in the Beta version of Amatomu, but now again the site has almost no response and giving database errors, this could be due to the fact that they are upgrading the system. Lets just hope for a better ranking algorithm to match that Afrigator has.