South Africa’s first blog search engine

My friend Vincent Maher has developed a great application for South Africans and anyone really wanting to find South African blogs – something that has been sorely lacking in the blogosphere. Amatomu is what has been described as the South African Technorati – I have no doubt it will be as good. While Vin and I worked together at the School of Journalism and Media Studies at Rhodes University he developed some amazing applications – content management systems, the Grocott’s Online and it seems leaving the School to go to the M&G hasn’t changed that need for him to develop and innovate – congratulations!

More about Amatomu – I looked through it briefly and what struck me is that when searching for certain topics only two or three blogs come up repeatedly. This means there aren’t enough South Africans blogging about important topics – I think too many of them have set up blogs just to rant and share their daily and very personal experiences. While there is nothing wrong with that, it does leave a gap for the type of blogs that many many people prefer to visit – subject related ones run by someone who actually knows what they are talking about, writes well and has researched each post. There are millions of these in the blogosphere, just not enough in South Africa.