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which would irate my user base in order to measure them would be crazy IMHO, however, there are still people who do not publish their full blog RSS feed for this exact reason (audience measurement).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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Comments On This Post
March 21, 2007 at 1:46 am
Thanks for the blog on amatomu, vinnie….yep points noted. we’re still in developing phase. soon to launch though!!
March 21, 2007 at 2:15 am
…and also bear in mind that the top 10 (by blog popularity) shows separately for 24 hours, 7 days and a month… and your alexa diagram is a monthly chart… so for example on any one day (24 hours) a blog may not be popular on some days than others, but overall could be more popular on the monthly stat. Also you’ve been on the system a short time (less than a month)… so you should give it time to filter through and for the system to record your traffic!!! Vincent is going to publish a full explanation on his blog now that that cat has clawed its way out the bag
March 21, 2007 at 2:41 am
Great – thanks Matt! I’m really impressed with what you guys have done! Looking forward to seeing it grow steadily!!
March 20, 2007 at 11:46 pm
Thanks for the blog on amatomu, vinnie….yep points noted. we’re still in developing phase. soon to launch though!!
March 21, 2007 at 12:15 am
…and also bear in mind that the top 10 (by blog popularity) shows separately for 24 hours, 7 days and a month… and your alexa diagram is a monthly chart… so for example on any one day (24 hours) a blog may not be popular on some days than others, but overall could be more popular on the monthly stat. Also you’ve been on the system a short time (less than a month)… so you should give it time to filter through and for the system to record your traffic!!! Vincent is going to publish a full explanation on his blog now that that cat has clawed its way out the bag
March 21, 2007 at 12:41 am
Great – thanks Matt! I’m really impressed with what you guys have done! Looking forward to seeing it grow steadily!!
March 21, 2007 at 8:52 am
What is the algo using? The tracking code that amatomu generates when you add a new blog to their site, or external factors such as alexa?
March 21, 2007 at 9:47 am
[...] So far (Wed morning 9:31am) we’ve seen these blogs about it: Tyler Woza Friday (carrying Amatomu tag cloud about 2 mins after Tyler broke story!
chilibean Charl van Niekerk nicharalambous Imel Vinny Lingham Startup Squad [...]
March 21, 2007 at 10:15 am
Eric, we’re using our logs right now and will be introducing 2 others soon, also internal. Have a look at my post about this on vincentmaher.com/mit
March 21, 2007 at 12:58 pm
I wouldn’t count Alexa, I don’t think it’s stats are entirely accurate enough for SA.
March 21, 2007 at 6:52 am
What is the algo using? The tracking code that amatomu generates when you add a new blog to their site, or external factors such as alexa?
March 21, 2007 at 8:15 am
Eric, we’re using our logs right now and will be introducing 2 others soon, also internal. Have a look at my post about this on vincentmaher.com/mit
March 21, 2007 at 10:58 am
I wouldn’t count Alexa, I don’t think it’s stats are entirely accurate enough for SA.
March 23, 2007 at 11:58 am
[...] 3. Blog stats – excluding the RSS readers: The heading really says it all. As the take up of RSS as a generally accepted information channel increases, the number of views on a post or site will likely decrease. Vinny sums this up pretty well here. [...]
August 16, 2009 at 11:52 pm
thank you for sharing
September 11, 2009 at 7:17 pm
Don’t count on alexa for blogging
September 11, 2009 at 7:19 pm
is this a threat for alexa?
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