Afrigator is one year old today.
Afrigator is a social media aggregator and directory built especially for African digital citizens who publish and consume content on the Web.
Whatever that means.
Mike Stopforth has asked “Submit your ideas on the 1 TH1NG you’d change if you were us, and stand to win R 1000!”
This is my submission, though I don’t expect any prizes for it.
The one thing i would change would be to explain in clear and simple language (and not techie geek language) what Afrigator does, and how to make it work from the “client” side rather than the “server” side (to use techie geek language).
I joined Afrigator soon after it started, with my other blog Notes from underground. I put the link in the sidebar, but I very rarely click on it, because when I get to the Afrigator site I don’t know what I’m looking at or what I’m supposed to see.
There are all kinds of explanations of how they did it and how they made it work, but very little to say what it does when it is working, or how to interpret what you see there.
Well, it does say “You can use Afrigator to index your blog, podcast, videocast or news site (i.e. any site that publishes an RSS feed) and market it to the rest of Africa and the world. You can also use it to discover new sites in the Afrosphere.”
But I’ve never seen the index to my blog on Afrigator or worked out how to access it.
So the one thing I would do if I were running Afrigator would be to make it user friendly for people who aren’t techie geeks.
Oh, and Mike Stopforth says that I must get someone to submit this post to Muti.
The only problem is, I don’t think anyone who reads this blog regularly even knows what Muti is. It’s another techie geek thing, you see. Perhaps if Mike Stopforth himself happens to pass this way, he could submit this post to Muti. It’s considered bad form to submit your own posts to Muti. Perhaps that’s one way of keeping Muti exclusive for the techie geek in-crowd — you scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours.
Afrigator sounds good, but I’d really like to know how to make it do what it’s supposed to do.
3 Comments
5 April 2008 at 10:49 am
Hi there. Firstly thanks for mentioning Afrigator.com – we try hard to make it a useful and accessible product despite the fact that it is a labour of love more than anything else (we all have day jobs).
You are right, Afrigator could get more user-friendly and your feedback is very valuable. You’ll have noticed that I did submit your post to Muti.co.za (sorry if you felt the Muti idea was a bad one on our part but how else could we judge a winner with the help of the African blogging community?)
To get your site indexed on Afrigator, simply register for an account and submit your site. Afrigator will then ask you to put some tracking code into your blog (with instructions) and you should be cool from there. Let us know if you have any struggles at dudes@afrigator.com.
Thanks again,
Mike
5 April 2008 at 6:44 pm
Mike,
I wasn’t objecting to the idea of putting it on Muti, but rather to the idea that it is bad form to list your own blog posts on Muti — because that will keep Muti limited to certain kinds of blogs.
Anyway, thanks for the comment. I like the idea of Afrigator bringing African blogs together in one place, and hope it can get a bit more user friendly. The Beta version is better than the Alpha, so perhaps the Gamma will be better still.
5 April 2008 at 8:28 pm
Hi Steve,
On the Muti issue, the soft rule is that it’s fine to occasionally submit your own posts to Muti if you feel that they would be useful or important for the other users to see. The problem comes though when some users habitually submit ALL of their posts to Muti – which amounts to spam.
I really appreciate your feedback on the site though, because we really don’t want to limit the exposure of blogs on there just to techie blogs!