SA's top blogs?
There was a time when blogging was the domain of individuals, sharing their day-to-day thoughts online.
Today blogging has been taken over by media houses, entrepreneurial organisations and wanna-be publishers. Which makes it pretty difficult to work out who the top bloggers – in the original sense of the word – are. And using local, and international blog aggregators and stats engines makes the task even harder. Particularly as there is no common comparative method of assessing blogs and their audiences.
According to Amatomu, the blog aggregator run by the Mail & Guardian, the top ten blogs in South Africa right now are:
1 – Big Brother
2 – Keo.co.za
3 – Rugbydump.com
4 – The Times Planet Blog
5 – Shaun Dewberry’s Weblog
6 – Adii Freelancer & Business Strategist
7 – Minor Matters
8 – Times Multimedia
9 – Watkykjy
10 – Thought Leader
With the exception of Shaun Dewberry, Adii Freelancer and Watkykjy, the top ten sites are dominated by either established media houses such as Avusa and the M&G, or by independent publishing houses. And of the three "personal" sites that most closely resemble a traditional blog, two of those should probably never be in the top ten. Shaun Dewberry’s blog and Watkykjy are ranked a at 1086 and 58 by page views on rival blog tracker Afrigator. Similarly, they both feature somewhere around 904 000 on international blog tracker Technorati. In comparison, Adii Freelancer is ranked among the top 200 on Technorati.
Afrigator
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 – Adii
4 – Blat
5 – Web AddiCT(s)
6 – Times Multimedia
7 – South Africa Rocks
8 – So Close
9 – The Wild Frontier at The Times
10 – Justin Hartman
Afrigator uses a different methodology to ranks its top ten blogs which uses both traffic as well as "influence" to compile the top ten. On the whole it works quite well with just a handful of "big media" sites listed in the top ten – Thought Leader, Times Multimedia and The Wild Frontier – and the remainder easily categorised as personal blogs.
A third metric to consider is the South African list held by Technorati, one of the original blog trackers. It looks like this:
1 – Adii Freelancer
2 – Marco’s blog
3 – Ninja Monkeys!
4 – Online Reputation Management
5 – AfriGadget
6 – Cape Town Daily Photo
7 – SA Rocks
8 – Vinny Lingham’s Blog
9 – Cherryflava
10 – Web AddiCT(s)
Again, the list throws up a number of new names that haven’t appeared on either of the other lists, which makes it almost impossible to determine which blogs are in fact the most important and influential in South Africa. Based on the blogs that appear on more than one of these lists, it could be argued that the most important blogs in South Africa are very likely to be:
1 – Adii Freelancer
2 – Thought Leader
3 – Keo
4 – Rugbydump
5 – SA Rocks
6 – Web AddiCT(s)
7 – The Times Multimedia.
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