If you’re an African blogger, and you’re not yet a part of Afrigator, you’re doing yourself a disservice. Afrigator is an African blog aggregator that keeps you up to date with bloggers across Africa, but beyond that it’s a valuable tool. They provide analytics that allow you to see how many people are visiting your site and from where.
Afrigator Gets Even Better
They have just released their new beta of their service, completely redesigned and with added functionality. I’m extremely impressed with how polished it seems, but that’s to be expected from the guys working on it. There’s no reason for me to do another review of all the changes, those have been covered well by Charl and Marshall.
So How Many Bloggers are There in Africa Anyway?
That’s a question that I keep asking, and one that’s hard to measure. Afrigator might give us the best start in finding that answer.
I asked Justin Hartman if he would mind sharing what their numbers are by country. He graciously obliged, and you can see them at right.
Because Afrigator is developed (and marketed most) by South Africans the blog count is heavily tilted that direction. However, the rest of the countries are fairly accurate relative to each other. We know that Kenya does indeed have one of the largest populations of bloggers in Africa as does Nigeria. I do notice that there is a lack of North African countries, and I know that there are a lot of bloggers from there.
What I’d like to see is a true representation across all of the African blogosphere. With some intelligent spidering, I would think that Afrigator is best positioned to tackle this challenge.
What we can all do is help spread the word to our other African blogger counterparts and get them signed up on Afrigator, helping to legitimize our region by organization and ease of finding good bloggers in any country.
November 29, 2007 at 12:48 am
I am registered on Afrigator and the beta version was mind-blowing really. The more bloggers register on it the better.
Cheers
November 29, 2007 at 3:42 am
Thanks for the link Hash, very interesting blogger stats
November 29, 2007 at 4:26 am
Thanks for the mention bud – hope we can continue to improve it!
November 29, 2007 at 5:15 am
Dont forget the whole language situation. Larg parts of North Africa speak French or Arabic.
November 29, 2007 at 6:56 am
Thank you for the kind words, guys! We would certainly love to grow on a continent level and it would be great to see the signups growing outside the SA borders too!
@JohnofScribbleSheet: It is high on the priority list. We definitely are making work of it!
November 29, 2007 at 8:54 am
Hash @ I have a substantial number of North African blogs on my bloglines plus a few francophone ones which I will go through and leave a comment about Afrigator. But another quicker suggestion would be to contact the Francophone and Mid East (they also cover North Africa) Editors at Global Voices and ask them for a list or to spread the Afrigator word!
November 29, 2007 at 9:11 am
Maybe at some point Afrigator could develop later into some kind of AfriFaceor !!!
November 29, 2007 at 1:42 pm
I’m an African blogger, but from francophone area (based in Côte d’Ivoire) and I think it’s difficult to sign up. I tried for my wife blog (www.babiwatch.wordpress), but I resigned. Can you make something like a tutorial, I can translate it in French and promote it.
November 29, 2007 at 1:58 pm
I’ve seen the beta version, it’s good but I hope they’ll make a French version. My wife blog (www.babiwatch.wordpress.com) is registered. All is OK.
November 30, 2007 at 12:17 am
Hi Fellow Bloggers,
I Interned as an Editor/Newsmaster for the last five months with a major independent publisher based in Italy and during the time… I have had the wonderful opportunity to meet really cool people and learn about great web2.0 tools that can be utilized in Africa to increase citizen journalism and also connect remote regions to the world wide web grid.
During my training I covered web2.0 start-up, press releases, and certainly Afrigator is getting exposure in the west. It was featured on http://www.masternewmedia.org and other many social networking sites.
I hope in the coming days we can all network, collaborate and share information about blogging and other cool topics.
Keep blogging and keep writing good content… and monetize your blogs by displaying Google Adsense and other online revenue streams… like other Independent online publishers in Europe , Asia, North America and now Africa.
November 30, 2007 at 2:11 am
nice. Was just thinking about Afrigator the other day…I think the coolest thing about it is that it sorts the african blogosphere so neatly, especially their trends page; I like those graphs! http://afrigator.com/trends…What with african blogosphere being a collection of niches, its great to have an ‘anchoring platform’ and an ‘anchoring blogger’ like you 🙂 Cheers to the Afrigator team.
December 3, 2007 at 6:00 am
Thank you for this report. :.-)
December 8, 2007 at 12:20 pm
an amazing toof afrigator is, and i am glad that the African blogosphere is growing…
January 8, 2008 at 7:59 pm
Hello, Hash and all,
A little comment to inform you about the creation of a new blogging platform in Ivory Coast, http://www.ivoire-blog.com. A new Web 2.0 initiative in Africa and I hope that Hash will help us to make a buzz about it. kouamouoatyahoo.com
January 14, 2008 at 5:41 am
Thnks for the references..
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Check it out..there are free downloads !!!