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!

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.

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.

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 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.

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.