Measuring the African Blogosphere
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.
{ 25 comments… read them below or add one }
I am registered on Afrigator and the beta version was mind-blowing really. The more bloggers register on it the better.
Cheers
[...] Amabile wrote an interesting post today on Measuring the African BlogosphereHere’s a quick [...]
Thanks for the link Hash, very interesting blogger stats
Thanks for the mention bud – hope we can continue to improve it!
Dont forget the whole language situation. Larg parts of North Africa speak French or Arabic.
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!
[...] White African: Measuring the African blogosphere [...]
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!
Maybe at some point Afrigator could develop later into some kind of AfriFaceor !!!
[...] the data at White African, there appears to be about 1655 blogs registered on Afrigator. Note the word [...]
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.
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.
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.
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.
[...] Measuring the African Blogosphere | White African [...]
Thank you for this report. :.-)
[...] che fanno pensare più a telefilm anni ‘70 che a realtà conclamate. Certo che a guardare la dimensione della blogosfera Africana vien da chiedere a questi “Rockefeller del blog” di donare qualcosina dei loro guadagni [...]
[...] Measuring the African Blogosphere | White African an update on Afrigator (tags: africa blogging blogosphere socialmedia) [...]
[...] facet is the growing blogosphere in Africa and its contribution to critical reports about politics or social development. The ISP article sees [...]
an amazing toof afrigator is, and i am glad that the African blogosphere is growing…
[...] vi um elo interessante a Afrigator no White African. Afrigator pretende agregar elos a blogues na África. O número de blogues registrados no [...]
[...] HT: White African [...]
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
Thnks for the references..
http://estabater.blogspot.com | N#1 Spot for the Best of The Mozambican Music.
Check it out..there are free downloads !!!
[...] White African, uno de los blogs africanos más famosos, de origen keniata, publicaba a finales del pasado noviembre una relación por países del número de blogs publicados en África a partir de los datos del agregador sudafricano Afrigator. Un recuento incompleto, como en White African se reconoce (en la lista de países representados falta, por ejemplo, Marruecos), pero que nos puede dar una idea aproximada del ritmo de crecimiento de la blogosfera africana. [...]
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