SA’s top blogging platform expands exposure and measurability to wider blogosphere
(Cape Town) February 25, 2009 – The continent’s top blog platform has officially joined the wider African blogosphere, otherwise known as the Afrosphere. Having integrated 24.com’s blogging engine with Afrigator – Africa’s leading social media aggregator and directory of online content published and consumed by Africans – 24.com bloggers can now join this uniquely African community with a single click.
The new feature gives users the opportunity to not only gauge the popularity of their blog within the different 24.com brands (Wheels24, Women24, Sport24, news24 etc.) and the 24.com environment, but also in South Africa as well as the rest of Africa. According to the largest survey of South African bloggers conducted last year, almost 40 percent of local bloggers use the 24.com blog platform.
“Adding the country’s largest blogging community to Afrigator, effectively puts 24.com bloggers out into the wider world and lets them discover fellow bloggers, make new friends and generally contribute toward the African zeitgeist,” say Justin Hartman, MD and co-founder of Afrigator. “Providing bloggers with statistics that were previously unavailable to them, the integration also gives individual users the chance to see how their blog resonates within the 24.com network of websites, as well as with audiences outside of South Africa.”
“By opening the window to the World Wide Web a little wider we are giving 24.com bloggers a new way to engage with other African and South African bloggers and nudging them into the mainstream of this vibrant new medium,” says Alistair Fairweather, Social Media Manager at 24.com. “The blogosphere is all about open democracy, personal expression, discovery and debate. At 24.com we’ve come to recognise that a commitment to openness will help us to serve our users better and improve our Web 2.0 capabilities.”
According to “Speak Up!” – a 2008 census of the South African blogosphere conducted by 24.com – approximately 60 percent of bloggers publish online to express themselves or have fun; with more than half of bloggers making one to five posts weekly. While the bulk of bloggers’ inspiration comes from personal experiences (48 percent), the other top sources include local and international media sites and media releases (24 percent), and local and international blogs (14 percent). Currently, only about five percent of bloggers in South Africa claim to have a monthly audience of more than 10 000.
To access a Q&A about the new blog feature from 24.com and Afrigator, visit http://blogs.24.com/afrigator.
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About 24.com
Based in Cape Town, 24.com is comprised of a network of South Africa’s top-ranked sites, including News24, Health24, Women24 and Fin24. Each month, 24.com’s family of brands collectively welcomes more than 2.3 million South Africans looking to interact with like-minded communities around up to the minute local and international content. Dedicated to creating and sustaining a uniquely South African online social ecosystem, 24.com includes various Internet-based services such as blogs, photo albums, free web-based mail and user-generated networking tools such as Answerit, PLAY and Laaik.it. For more information, visit www.24.com.
About Afrigator
Afrigator Internet (Pty) Ltd is a technology company based in Cape Town, South Africa. In April 2007 Afrigator.com, a social media aggregator and blog directory, was launched to the public. Afrigator also pioneered Adgator, a blog advertising network reaching more than 600,000 unique users in January 2009.The company has already enjoyed a fair amount of success by receiving the accolade of having being listed as #20 of 31 top non-US start-ups to watch worldwide by Business 2.0 (money.cnn.com). In a feature for the New York Times (nytimes.com), Afrigator was voted as one of the Top 10 International Products for 2008 by US technology site ReadWriteWeb. MIH Print Africa, a division of Naspers Limited, acquired a stake in the company further cementing the fact that Afrigator is a driven and focused technology company looking to expand in emerging markets. For more information, visit http://afrigator.com.
For more information please contact:
Andrew Cole
Atmosphere Communications
Tel: 021 469 1578; Cel: 079 483 3208
andrew@atmosphere.co.za