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amatomu.com
Blogs aren't easy to pigeonhole, so Amatomu lists S. African blogs as "roughly in" certain broad categories. |
A couple of weeks ago, the major S. African daily
Mail & Guardian launched
Amatomu, a site that aggregates S. African blogs. Think of it as a kind of
Technorati for S. Africa. The site is currently in "alpha mode," but it is public and live.
Tidbits contributers Vincent Maher and Matthew Buckland were two leading developers for this project. Last month Maher gave me a sneak preview. I'm pretty impressed, so far.
I've seen several news organizations struggle with the best way to present local bloggers. Typically they end up creating a blog section of their main site that showcases staff blogs, syndicates content from selected local blogs, and offers a blogroll-style list of links to other local bloggers. (For example, see the blogs pages from the Denver Post or Philly.com.) Building a blog aggregator holds far more long-term potential for news orgs and broader appeal for communities, I think.
Obviously, advertising provides the core business case for a news org to create a local or regional blog aggregator. Buckland told me via chat (at 2 a.m. mountain time -- when insomnia strikes, I love working with a global team!) that advertising on Amatomu "is coming... We don't want to go to heavy into advertising just yet. We want to give the site an opportunity to establish itself."
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Currently, Amatomu bears a house ad for M&G in top right corner. "That space is ready for an advertiser," says Buckland. "We've had lots of interest." While display ads are fine, it seems to me that in the long run targeted and contextual text ads might work even better for a geographically focused blog aggregator.
I think it's also smart that the M&G spun Amatomu off as a separately branded site, while maintaining the connection to the M&G brand in the site footer. Many news orgs are concerned -- for good reason -- about syndicating blog content on their own site. However, Amatomu is positioned as a service, rather than as content. Its value is that it provides a focused, searchable, customizable window onto the S. African blogosphere. This way, M&G seems to avoid the impression that the established M&G brand is hanging in any way on the quality of content from selected blogs.
I'll blog more later about specific noteworthy features of Amatomu. But in general, I think savvy news organizations might consider emulating this approach.
What do you think of the regional blog aggregator approach? Is this something news orgs should be doing? Do you like how M&G handled the branding issue? How do you think this model might apply to news sites or organizations in the U.S. and elsewhere? Please comment below.
