Wednesday 25 April 2007

African Bloggers and Blog Aggregators who exactly is helping who

I've been testing on an off an African blog aggregator using "pligg" a clone of digg for the african blogosphere. As of now the blog aggregator is off, it may still come back on. There aren't that many african blog aggregators and the ones available are not exactly "any good" in my opinion. The thing is I know exactly what am looking for in a blog the digg design captures it exactly, the power of collective voting to decide what exactly is wortrh my time . I have seen quite a few aggregators that have tried to in effect copy this but when I take a look at the front page I am baffled, in fact puzzled that how on earth did that get there. What this does is put me off immediately..


Why does this not happen in digg ?

The answer lies in the digg algorithm. Digg figured out a long ttime ago that the main voters will be people looking to improve their sites ie trying to advertise for free. In truth thats what the platform is for. When I asked this about Muti I was asked to join and vote for what I deem interesting. Pardon my excessive comparison with Digg, but a long time ago Digg classified its users.

(1) The Submitters
(2) The Voters
(3) The readers

Although any of this 3 groups may write comments
People generally fall into on e of these 3 categories.

Its an ecosystem and all of them are required if (1) doesnt exis there will be no stories (2) is what organizes the place so (3) will come .

The problem with most sites is that 1 == 2 == 3 hence the stories that make it to the top have high bias


Now back to the title of the post, who exactly is helping who, the blog aggregator project have been working on started out as afribian.com and has been on since last year october sometime, its not like it hasnt made anyway its just that there's no point releasing a blog aggregator if your bloggers have to do more for you than you do for them.

Naturally some blogs have more traffic than the people who aggregate them, so for me until i think of a way to organize these blogs such that it makes it interesting for the readers of the aggregator and hence brings new trafic to the bloggers, there really isnt any point for an aggregator.

1 comment:

Omodudu said...

I think you have discounted the ower of the crowd to a large extent. African Aggregators have too few users so that the system is easy to game as each vote carry too much weight.