MyScoop, South Africa’s youngest blog aggregator is again leaving competitors in the dust, this time by doing a revamp of their home page.

MyScoop is the brainchild of Nick Duncan, SEO consultant by day and Web Entrepreneur by night, who first started MyScoop as a social link sharing site but later changed it over to a full blown blog aggregator as competitor blog aggregator Amatomu was busy dying a slow death.

MyScoop was the first South African blog aggregator to introduce real-time aggregation, just showing how commited MyScoop are to being inovative and offering its users the best possible exposure.

This time it’s no different, MyScoop has overhauled their home page look and layout. The new layout includes a featured author section that shows information about an random author that has their name, bio, twitter details filled in and uploaded a picture. They also included a featured blogs section that showcases random blogs from the top 100 listed blogs blogs on MyScoop. For more features check out the official MyScoop post.

It’s evident that MyScoop values its blogs and are doing allot to bring more exposure and traffic to them, so if you’re blogger and your blog is not yet signed up with MyScoop I would urge you to do it. It’s free and you will get allot of exposure for your blog, so what are you waiting for? Go sign up now!

This Friday the 27th of November 27dinner will be taking place in Cape Town at the Knead Bakery, Wembley Square.

Join in for the last 27 dinner of 2009 in Cape Town. An evening of inspiring talks and superb conversation with smart and talented web, mobile, media and marketing people.

The Talks

• Justin Hartman: Founder / CEO of Afrigator. Justin will be giving us some exiting news about Afrigator (South Africa’s largest blog aggregator)
• Raymond De Villiers, CEO of Wisdom Games: Raymond will be talking about Serious Play: Using computer games for corporate learning
• Dave Duarte: Founder of Huddlemind will MC

Remember that there is only 100 places available so head on over to 27dinner to book your place.

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.