Digg takes some Muti

CEO Jay Adelson and founder Kevin Rose of internet phenomenon Digg.com, announced today that they will be purchasing a controlling stake in www.muti.co.za.

Reminiscing about the 'old' days (Digg.com was launched in December 2004) Rose commented how the community that is currently active at Muti reminds him of how the Digg community was when it was before it exploded to become one of the web's most active sites. The submitters, readers and bloggers regularly engage one another as they debate issues, some important, some superficial.

Adelson said that, much like Google, they saw South Africa as an entry point into the untapped African market. He sees Muti's simple, easy to use interface ideal for mobile integration, the device Africans will use to connect.

Although no amounts have been announced, it's widely believed that R77, 7 million has been negotiated for the 51% stake in Muti. It's still uncertain how the windfall is going to be split amongst Neville, Dave, Charle and Eric, reports Igotua Gain.

Amatomu, Muti, Afrigator match Sharks, Bulls

Being interested to find Australasian comment on the Super 14 results this weekend, I set out to find the New Zealand equivalent of Amatomu, Muti and Afrigator. Ie. a blog aggregator specifically meant for New Zealand-centric content.
Seems like while our rugby teams managed to overpower the Blues & Crusaders, our blog gurus have totally annihilated their New Zealand counterparts. The best I could find was a stuff.co.nz , not even an aggregator.
So I moved on. Why not see what the Australians are saying about the rugby. Could be interesting. My list of Aussie publications I scan were way to 'factual.' I watched the games, I know what happened. I wanted some opinions. Again the search for a blog aggregator! This is what I found (Aussies reading this please feel free to correct me and send me links, but a Google search from "Australian Blog Aggregator" should suffice.) www.news2.com.au, www.buggerall.com.au & www.gnoos.com.au.

News2.com.au - besides an extremely nauseating frontpage ad for BuggerAll, it's uninspiring look and feel really did not prompt me to want to delve into what it had to offer. It really didn't seem like there was much anyways. A tag cloud exactly like the one found in this blog on the right highlights 'YOUR' as being the most used 'tag' and they advertise that they update every 30 minutes!

BuggerAll.com.au - The Australianblog's craiglist. Just a whole load of tags. Otherwise the name is extremely apt!

Gnoos.com.au - Probably the nicest looking of the three, even so the only feature I like is the nice prominent search box. Otherwise we are treated to the top 5 searches, 5 'hot tags' and three little boxes for the latest posts "Aussie Posts", "Aussie Media" & "Global Blogs". That's it.

So in the end, I gave up. Kudos (and Kudus) to the SA aggregators, you guys rock!!

Amatomu Ups the Ante

Things are hotting up in the SA blogosphere!

The 2007 Blog awards were held on Friday, Amatomu has pretty much launched itself into public alpha (see Monday's post), Muti arrives and then Afrigator is launched.
Read Gino Cosme's post today for an interesting take on the Benefit of two social media aggregators for business.

Now Amatomu has already launched an upgraded feature, and it's really cool. Those of you even remotely interested in all things online have to give this a look. Go to amatomu.com and click in the 'Trends' tab. The have some really cool charts for "Total page views", "Post per day", "Category breakdown" etc. As a blogger they have also added like graphs particular to your blog.

Very cool guys, I like where this is leading.

I know you read these posts, so here's my suggestion. How about a graph tracking the blogs daily ratings?

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!