I haven taken a closer look at the South African blogosphere the last days and I thought it would be good idea to share my findings with you. For me - as a German blogger - it was pretty interesting to discover the blogosphere of another country and to compare it with what is happening in Germany.
amatomu - the south african blogosphere, sorted
After I had the idea to investigate the South African blogosphere (the reason why comes at the end of this post) I quickly discovered the awesome website amatomu, which is done by the mail&guardian online, a popular south african news site.
The Mail & Guardian Online was the first internet-based news publications in Africa. Launched in early 1994, it is one of South Africa’s and Africa’s major news publishers and is reputed internationally for its quality content.
Amatomu provides you with tons of informations about the south african blogosphere. You have a huge directory of round about 2400 weblogs, sorted by different categories like “news&politics”, “business”, “technology”, “entertainment”, “media&marketing”, “sport”, “life”, “humor” and “religion”.
You have blogcharts, which can be sorted by page impressions, technorati rank, posts and two other figures. You can compare blogs, you get a few trends, the latest posts and a few other statistics.
All in all it is an insanely useful website and I really miss a German match for that. We simply don’t have our own amatomu. We have the Deutsche Blogcharts and the Top100Business Blogs, but we don’t have this central website, which really gives you an awesome overview about the German blogosphere.
We had the blogscout website in the past - it was a privately funded project, to provide detailed stats about the German blogosphere, but it closed its doors in September 2007 and since then nothing really happened, except a fruitless discussion about it 
What are the South Africans blogging about?
When I played around in the beginning with the amatomu website I noticed something really surprising: 47,52% of the page impressions within the South African blogosphere go to sports related blogs. But sport related blogs are only 3.75% of all blogs within the blogosphere.
The top two blogs (by page impressions) are the Keo.co.za and the Rugbydump.com blog. Both dedicated to Rugby. They draw a massive traffic, have quite a lot of comments on their blogs, but don’t seem to be discussed a lot within the blogosphere itself. Keo.co.za is on rank 72 and Rugbydump isn’t in the top100 at all, if you sort the ranking by the Technorati rank.
You can interpret this figures in many different ways - but for me it shows that they have two very popular blogs, which are read and used by (normal) people, who aren’t an active part of the blogosphere. Therefore the blog format itself seems to be on its way to be accepted by South African online users in general. (Would love to get a few comments/opinions from South African bloggers about that) - the funny thing is - I guess in Germany we don’t have any popular sport blogs at all.
Another thing I noticed was the fact that within the top10 blogs not only those two rugby blogs are listed, but also two editorial group blogs, which are done again by the news company “Mail&Guardian Online”. The Thought Leader and the Tech Leader, which are both really interesting and well made weblogs.
For me it’s really interesting to see, that the Mail&Guardian seems to drive the South African blogosphere quite strongly, not only by creating amatomu, which claims to generate 10% of the total SA blog traffic, but also by being present with two popular top blogs. Even if also German publishing houses have started their own blogs, none of them plays such an active role within the blogosphere, like the Mail&Guardian seems to play in South Africa.
Apart from that - as you can see in the screenshot from the amatomu website above - the category having the most blogs is “life” with 32,21% - one very nice and very popular blog within this category is the So Close blog:
A popular blog written by an ex-infertile, wine drinking mother of twins living in Cape Town.
This category is followed by Technology 21,15%, Media&Marketing 13,94% and News & Politics with 9,62%. I would assume (but I am not sure, because we don’t have this amatomu like service) that this is quite similar to Germany.
The top blog in South Africa, adii, has a Technorati rank of 1288 and the German top blog, Basic Thinking, has a Technorati rank of 1896 - therefore the quantity of discussions within the blogosphere about what other blogs are writing seems to be pretty equal, regarding the top blogs.
If you take into account that only about 11% of the round about 50 million South Africans are online, compared to the 65% of the around about 82 million Germans, this is quite surprisingly (source). But of course here you also have to take the big difference: the language into account. While German blogs, written in German are very limited in its international reach, South African blogs can reach a worldwide audience.
But crushing numbers and comparing them is always a very difficult thing. In the end the website amatomu and the few numbers I looked into showed me, that South Africa has also a really vital, diverse and strong blogosphere.
Why have I looked into this?
Well - this blog article only summarize a few things I could find out via the Amatomu website and can’t give a really deep inside, because I am not part of the SA blogosphere and I couldn’t read those blogs for a longer time (even if I have now subscribed to about 20 pretty awesome SA blogs) - but I hope it helps people to get a quick overview, if someone is interested in the South African blogosphere.
Btw: I would love to get feedback from South African bloggers, who might read this and want to provide us with a deeper inside, than I could provide.
I am personally interested in the SA blogosphere, because I visited South Africa (Capetown and then the typical roadtrip from coast to coast) in spring 2003 for three months and absolutely fall in love with this country and the city Capetown.
At the moment I am working as a freelance consultant, creative & information architect in the realm of virtual worlds, social media and semantic web. I am located in Berlin / Germany at the Business Class.Net - a co-working space, which is opening offices all around the world - and right now they are also planning to open an office in Capetown.
That triggered me to investigate the blogosphere to get an idea about what is happening down there in the market I am working in. And it looks pretty good and promising. The only thing I couldn’t find so far is a South African weblog dedicated to Virtual Worlds 
17 responses so far ↓
1 Vincent Maher // Jun 29, 2008 at 10:07 am
Hi there I loved this post and I think your analysis of the sports vs traffic issue is a good one. I created Amatomu and would be very happy to answer any questions you have regarding some of the deeper issues. Drop me an email and let’s chat further.
2 Sebastian Küpers // Jun 29, 2008 at 2:44 pm
Hi Vincent - thanks for your reply and your offer - I will contact you within the next week for sure. I have tons of questions
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5 SimonB // Jun 30, 2008 at 4:33 pm
Hi Sebastian
Thanx for the great post. Yes M&G is doing alot for the SA Blogosphere.
It’s great to see international bloggers looking at our local blogosphere.
Hope you will be back to see more of our local blogs.
6 Nic // Jun 30, 2008 at 8:29 pm
Sebastian - Howzit (south african phase for “hello”)!!
Great post. I am proud to say that I work for Mail & Guardian Online and one of the driving forces that got me there is the incredible innovative nature of the company.
I run SA Rocks and love blogging. It is definitely taking off in SA and in a strange way, mass media’s involvement in the blogosphere is proof of this. We’ve seemingly taken it back to front here, with mainstream media’s uptake coming before the masses’ uptake.
It’s definitely done wonders to have the media involved in the sense of exposure to the greater audience and explaining slowly what a blog is and why people should read it. However the blogosphere remains small when it comes to actual active bloggers. I’d guestimate that there are maybe 1000 or less active bloggers in SA or coming from South Africans abroad.
Again, great post and I hope you keep reading SA Blogs!
7 Inspector Gadget // Jul 1, 2008 at 11:52 am
Good blog post Sebastian! I make use of three blog aggregators: Amatomu, Technorati, and Afrigator (another great African aggregator).
Each site offers something unique, with the statistics offered by Amatomu being the best feature in my opinion. However, each site works around quite fixed categories such as the ones you mention (e.g. sport, technology etc).
It would be great if one could have their blog placed under more than one of these. A lot of bloggers write under more than one category and it becomes frustrating when you write something about sport and your blog is listed under technology for example.
The content of my blog, for example, ranges from gadgets and tech, to video (media and marketing?), to news, and often entertainment. I’m certain that this is the same for other blogs.
I have asked if something new could be devised on the blogosphere to cater for this, but I guess with the size of it and the amount of bloggers it is difficult to respond to every request/suggestion.
Perhaps this will get heard here…
8 Björn // Jul 1, 2008 at 12:06 pm
I wonder if amatomu gives an extensive overview of THE Southafrican blogosphere. There were many websites in Germany that tried to be exhaustive in listing German blogs. None of them have succeeded.
Though amatomu may do a good job, I guess it shows only a fraction of what is blogged in SA.
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10 Simone Puterman // Jul 1, 2008 at 4:52 pm
@Sebastian: thanks for your insightful post
Come hang out with the South African bloggers etc on twitter - see http://satwitter.pbwiki.com/.
As mentioned by Inspector Gadget, there is also African social media aggregator Afrigator, and then there’s our social bookmarking service, Muti.
Also check out the research of Arthur Goldstuck, who heads up research organisation World Wide Worx, blogging on Thoughtleader: Africa’s big blogging bang.
11 Sebastian Küpers // Jul 1, 2008 at 7:23 pm
Thanks for your great comments. I really got a lot of response on this post via Comments and other channels.
@Nic - sure I will continue reading them. I have quite a few now in my reader. Just added SA rocks
@Inspector - I had the impression that I have seen a few blogs in more than one category on Amatomu. And yes I think it’s in general pretty difficult to categorize blogs, because a lot of them are not focused on one topic, but vary a lot.
@Björn - I agree with you - that’s most of the time one of the big problems. I assume that Amatomu also works with a kind of code-snippet, which bloggers need to add to their site. Therefore only the blogs who do that, will be listed - like on blogscout for example in Germany back in the days.
But it’s still a good point to start - You have 2400 blogs listed - if you wanna find even more, use the blog rolls on the 2400 blogs
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15 Sean // Jul 10, 2008 at 12:56 pm
Rugby and rugby are the top blogs on amatomu. Did anyone ask why?
16 Sebastian Küpers // Jul 10, 2008 at 3:44 pm
Do you know the answer Sean?
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