Wednesday
Mar212007
M&G launches Amatomu - and the SA blogosphere is officially sorted :)
Wednesday, March 21, 2007 at 5:11PM 
Amatomu is South Africa's own Technorati... In other words it's going to rank, organise and connect the South African blogosphere. For non-bloggers, this will be an EXCELLENT source of the freshest news and hottest topics in SA.
The private Alpha launch was done via an email from Matt Buckland, in which he asked bloggers not to break the story. Eventually though, one of us cracked and Tyler Reed was first to announce it. I somehow suspect that the Mail & Guardian crew knew exactly what they were doing.... and Vincent Maher (who developed the site) even said:
"We asked people not to blog about it and we were surprised to see that no-one actually did"
There's tremendous buzz around this site, which is testament to the fact that we sorely need something like this... You can see a list of Articles referencing Amatomu here.
This, once again, highlights the need for localized versions of popular global sites. It provides a more targeted way of finding information from home. It will also help provide a clearer understanding of the size and shape of the South African blogosphere. (Stats... Yay!)
As Vinny mentioned though, the ranking algorithm for the site may need some tweaking - Cherryflava, for example, one of South Africa's most popular blogs is currently ranked below alot of (presumably) less prominent blogs (76 at present). I'm just guessing here though.
Both Vincent and Matt from M&G are actively involved in the blogosphere, which is why they were able to come up with such a spot-on development, whereas companies like 24.com keep missing the boat.
One feature that would make Amatomu extra useful would be the ability to subscribe by RSS to certain tags. I'm sure Vince is on this already, but I mention it just in case he isn't.
Reader Comments (11)
Makes our jobs at tracking the SA blogosphere much easier hey Dave. :)
For the record however, I was not invited to try out Amatomu so i had no knowledge that is was supposed to be kept a secret.
[...] So far (Wed morning 9:31am) we’ve seen these blogs about it: Tyler (Broke the story) Woza Friday (put the Amatomu.com tag cloud on 2 mins after Tyler broke story! :-) chilibean Charl van Niekerk nicharalambous Imel Vinny Lingham Startup Squad Alwyn’s Blog Dave Duarte [...]
Tyler: lol... sure buddy, claim ignorance ;) Either way, I'm glad this thing's public knowledge now so we can start benefitting from it.
I'm personally quite motivated to build my traffic now that I know there's a ranking!!
heh -- thanks for the comments Dave and yr point re: RSS is noted!
Re: Tylers's comment, yeah I've got to back him on his comment. He found Amatomu.com and blogged it not aware of the initial discreteness around it... which with each passing day and new blogger joining the "secrecy" was getting shakier and shakier. Tyler's breaking news on it was an awesome blog post and we're glad it was the one that broke the story. It had to happen sooner or later... we were surprised with each passing day why nobody had been tempted sooner??? :-)
Thanks for your comment Matt, and congratulations. I know Tyler's tellin thr truth - just pulling his leg cos he did a damn fine job of "launching" the site:) Nice1 T!
What happened to the good old days when all I had to do is post every now and then? Now it's about "social networking" / "tag clouds" / "track backs" etc... are we making life too complicated?
Tripeak - there's always going to be different levels of participation for users with different needs.
My business thrives on knowing who is doing and saying what and when - so trackbacks, tagclouds and social networking actually simplify that process for me and make me more efficient at what I do rather than complicate it.
V v cool. and easy to use! Which is v NB for me.
So, how do I do the tags? Its easy with Technorati cos Typepad comes with a Technorati tag field. And do I have to ping Amatomu when I update my blog? Or will it ping automatically?
Aren't you impressed I know words like tag and ping?
I am
xx
Hey Tertia! HAHA - impressive indeed. You're gonna be the queen of Amatomu.
It pings it automatically after you have inserted the Amatomu code snippet in your blog (in the sidebar or something)... and it uses the same tags that you describe your posts with.
Thanks for the heads-up Dave! Just signed up... Now let's see if Yeah!Fi ever makes the front page!
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