Growing the African Blogosphere

Ethan Zuckerman posted about a the rise of African blog aggregators a few weeks ago. I had previously written about a couple of different Arab blog aggregators so it was interesting to see how my comrades back South were sizing up.

I've been signed up for both Afrigator and the Mail and Guardian's Amatomu for about 3 weeks now and have been pleasantly suprised. Amatomu has already managed to galvanise the South African blogosphere - I've personally found myself spending more time bouncing around South African blogs linked off Amatomu.

Afrigator has the potential to do the same for the wider continent - it's still early days and it still has to gain critical mass. One of the old-school ways they are trying to gain visibility (and some link love) is by giving away an iPod (and some t-shirts) to people who help sign up bloggers. Vincent Maher (from Amatomu) has setup a Buzz Graph to track the impact of the Afrigator campaign - which is very cool - using one aggregator to track the growth of another!