Kudus to Amatomu and Muti

Sunday's April Fool's story has caused some major excitement in EishLand! The story made it to the top "hot" spot at the www.muti.co.za and this in turn pushed up eishcoza.blogspot.com to 34th position in the www.amatomu.com top 500 blog list.

So in return for the increased traffic, I reckoned I would pay them back with a little featurette on these two fully fledged South African web services that I can guarantee will make your blog travels a whole lot more interesting.

Amatomu

Brought to you by Mail and Guardian Online, Amatomu is a South African blog portal. "Amatomu" means "reins" in isiZulu and it's goal is to "steer traffic towards bloggers by acting as a homepage and zeitgeist for the South African blog network."The internet universe is so immense that blogs originating from South Africa are pretty darn hard to find. Since discovering Amatomu that has all changed for me. It's been referred to by some as the Technorati of South Africa, but I don't know if it's just me, but I find it way more usable than it's 'big brother.'

It's has easy to navigate tabs which start with a 'full' top 500 listing (that oddly stops at 200!?). But then you can check through the top blogs by traffic for the past 24 hours, 7 days & month. The same can be done for each of the categories. It has a sidebar which lists new postings from registered blogs as they are posted. There is also a column for newest blogs and a "Zeitgeist" widget which displays most popular topics being blogged on the SA blogosphere.
As a blogger it's simple to register and as the rankings are calculated on actual traffic figures it's a fun way to keep tabs of visitor numbers in relation to fellow SA bloggers.

Muti
"An aggregator or news aggregator or feed reader is a client software that uses web feed to retrieve syndicated web content such as weblogs, podcasts, vlogs, and mainstream mass media website" : Wikipedia.

www.muti.co.za is an web based aggregator specifically serving postings originating from Africa.
Inspired by social bookmarking sites like digg.com and reddit.com, Muti allows registered users to submit stories they wish to share and others to then vote on the submitted stories. Those voted then move up and down the lists depending on the number of votes it gets. It gets a little more interesting in that you can also vote a story 'down' if you think it it's current score is underserved.
The submittor can then earn kudus, a word play on kudos, for their submissions and they too can be rated as good sources for news.
The user interface leaves a lot to be desired, but the concept has been tried and proven. A South African spin is necessary and welcomed. With continued development this could and should grow to become a major player in the SA Web 2.o market.
Take a look, register, see whats new and, of course, submit and/or vote for the latest story at eishcoza.blogspot.com!