South Africa has just received it’s first version of Technorati, and it’s called Amatomu, powered by Mail & Guardian - one of our more prominent offline news publishers, that have really driven the online industry forward locally. Tyler Reed covers off nicely on Amatomu on his blog. I think it’s a great looking site with a lot of potential - and it’s only in Alpha.
I have some criticisms though, on the ranking algorithm employed. It’s notable that this blog is ranked in the Top 10 (at the time of writing) in South Africa, but in doing a quick check on Alexa (yes, I know - I’m not the biggest fan either!), against the top 4 blogs, this blog is still pretty much the highest ranking by quite a bit in terms of reach & traffic.
Also, Amatomu doesn’t (not that any others do), count the number of active subscribers to a blog’s feed, in the case of this blog, that’s nearing 1000 according to Feedburner, and my server logs indicate around 3,000 unique user sessions every day. Anyways - what am I complaining about?! Top 10 in South Africa is still not bad for a blog anyways!
My main point, however, is that metrics related to reach and mind share are still not quantifiable, especially due to the effect that RSS feeds have had. In theory, I could limit my feed to just short summaries and require my readers to click through to read the whole article, which would in theory increase my traffic to the website and allow me to measure more accurately - HOWEVER, I do not believe in principle that you should build your content and distribution around your measurement constraints (technical or otherwise). Audience measurement should be an afterthought to distribution - I don’t care if Feedburner is distributing this feed to 10,000 people, but I’m only measuring 1,000, the point is that I’m reaching a larger audience that I can measure, and any attempt to implement measures which would irate my user base in order to measure them would be crazy IMHO, however, there are still people who do not publish their full blog RSS feed for this exact reason (audience measurement).
I’m still waiting for the day that I can embed a javascript pixel inside an XML feed 
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