SA's top blogs
Once the domain of teenagers and techies, blogs are now published by everyone from established media to CEOs. But which are South Africa’s biggest and best blogs?
While established news sites vie for top honours in the online reader stakes, there is an emerging segment of the online media world that is becoming equally contested: blogs.
Once the domain of bored teenagers and techies, blogs have grown beyond their original definition of personal weblogs, to include corporate blogs, independent and established media blogs and business entrepreneur blogs.
Increasingly, as blogs become seen as a new form of media, attempts are made to rank SA’s top blogs.
Doing this, however, is not simple. Unlike the online publishing world which has a choice of the Online Publishers Association or the Website Association of South Africa, there is no comparative method for evaluating the relative popularity of blogs. There are however, a number of aggregators that give some idea of what is popular, particularly if you understand what each one represents.
The Mail&Guardian-owned Amatomu is an exclusively South African blog aggregator. According to Amatomu, the top ten SA blogs are:
- Keo.co.za
- Rugbydump.com
- Adii Freelancer
- Thought Leader
- Steve Hofmeyr se Spoeg Blok
- Blat
- So Close
- Car Blog
- East Coast Radio Newswatch Blog
- Dispatch Now
Three of those, four if you include Steve Hofmeyr’s blog, could claim to fit the definition of a blog as a personal journal. The remainder are the work of either well-established media (East Coast, Dispatch Now), independent publishers (Keo, Rugbydump) or, in the case of Thought Leader and Blat, the work of dozens of writers all contributing to a single blog.
In fact, the top 20 spots are largely dominated by blogs published by professional publishers or business entrepreneurs.
At the top end of the scale sites such as Keo are averaging around 36 000 pages a day. A top-20 spot requires the blog to regularly top 2 000 pages a day. Making it into the top five requires a regular flow of around 5 000 or more page impressions a day.
The Afrigator aggregator, on the other hand, includes blogs from around the continent. Once blogs from Kenya and Ghana are removed from the mix the top ten SA blogs looks like this:
- Thought Leader
- Blogs at The Times
- South Africa Rocks
- iMod
- Your Group of Web AddiCTs
- So Close
- Aquila Online
- Urban Sprout
- The Wild Frontier at The Times
- Mark’s Digital Farm
Thought Leader is the multi-person blog run by the Mail & Guardian newspaper and similarly the Times blog is an Avusa-owned blog run by The Times newspaper. In both cases most of the authors are media professionals and the blog is used to extend the brand of the publishing house. The Afrigator rankings include many more "personal weblogs" than the Amatomu aggregator. These include iMod, So Close, and Your Group of Web AddiCT(s).
For a view of the most popular blogs run by, mostly, individuals and closer matching the original definition of blogs as personal weblogs, international aggregator Technorati offers the following top ten:
- Adii Freelancer
- Marco’s Blog
- Ninja Monkeys!
- Online Reputation Management
- Tectonic
- AfriGadget
- Cape Town Daily Photo
- SA Rocks
- Vinny Lingham’s Blog
- Cherryflava
The reason the Technorati list is so vastly different to both Amatomu’s and Afrigator’s is that Technorati works not on sheer traffic volumes but on popularity of the individual blogs. Cross linking and bookmarking play a more significant role in making up the Technorati list. Some of these blogs may not have as much traffic as other media sites but they trade in niche markets where they tend to be highly valued.
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