SA's top blogs

Rudolph Muller

Rudolph Muller is the editor at MyBroadband and covers telecoms and broadband news. Rudolph comes from an academic background, but left the University of...

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Blogging may well have taken a bit of a beating at the hands of microblogging tools like Twitter over the past year but there are still many popular South African bloggers that are being read by thousands of readers every day. Deciding exactly which of these is the most popular or the best is an impossible task, given the different systems used to quantify the reach of each blog.

It is a challenge compounded by the fact that most mainstream publishers have also entered the world of blogging, so while blogging was originally seen as the pursuit of individuals it is now very often driven by paid professionals.

In an effort work out which individual blogs are the most popular we compared two of South Africa’s blog aggregators: Amatomu and Afrigator.

According to Amatomu, the blog aggregator run by the Mail & Guardian, the top ten blogs in South Africa right now are:

1 Rugbydump.com
2 Keo.co.za
3 Car Blog
4 LazyGamer
5 District 9 – Wikus Van De Merwe
6 MSFT.NET Blogs (ZA)
7 Thought Leader
8 I Wrote This For You
9 2OceansVibe
10 Cell Phone Reviews

This is pretty much how the top ten list has looked for the past six months or so, with the exception of Cell Phone Reviews which is a new entrant. Cell Phone Reviews, however, is based in Estonia so it doesn’t qualify as a South African blog. The same is true of I Wrote this for You.

Interestingly, Amatomu has weeded out many of the publishing house blogs which dominated the list in November 2008 leaving mostly individually run blogs on the list, which makes for a relatively representative list of independent bloggers.

Rival blog-tracker Afrigator offers a completely different perspective. Although it tracks blogs across the African continent, a listing of South African blogs looks as follows:

1 Thought Leader
2 iMod
3 2Oceansvibe
4 Web AddiCT(s);
5 South Africa Rocks
6 Car Blog
7 So Close
8 Wonkie CartOOns!
9 hottest gossip
10 Justin Hartman

Again, the list consists of mostly blogs run by individuals or small independent operations. With the exception of Thought Leader, which is the Mail & Guardian’s blogging platform and which appears on both lists, there is very little similarity between the two lists. Even if you extend the list to the top 20 on both aggregators the lists don’t really overlap. Which highlights the problems with working out which are South Africa’s favourite blogs.

SA’s top blogs – which ones do you visit?