AfriGreater?

December 24th, 2008 | by kilps |

Considering the growing disillusionment with Amatomu along with my liking of Afrigator yet frustration with it – AfriGreater December is just what I needed.

The problem is quite simple: it’s just way too difficult to find new content. Put bluntly – everything is a bit of a mess and it’s hard to find new content you actually want to read.

Where’s the popularity contest?
Unless I can’t find the link (which would be a problem in itself ;) ) – there is no way to view recently popular blog posts. While I’m not a complete fan of Amatomu’s layout, which does show popular posts – consider the blogs section of Afrigator. All we see are recent posts in that category – which isn’t very useful.

Take a look at the Afrigator homepage:

african-blogs-videos-photos-social-media-afrigator_1230123364029

The primary content on the page – latest search results and latest blog posts – are not very useful. I don’t really care what other people are searching for; sure it might be interesting – but that should be side bar content. There is the top blogs list – which is good – but I still want posts.

Technorati overs a good example of what I’m thinking about (not that they are perfect…):

technorati-front-page_1230124848920

I haven’t tried to break down that page – because practically every block contains ‘rising posts’ in that section.

Sorting the news
I’m sure I’ve made my point about popular posts clear by now :) – so then there is my other pet annoyance: news. Afrigator does a great job of letting us know what is going on – but it clearly isn’t a Google News (there are no headline stories etc.). This is fine – but it leaves one wondering what the point is. The news section would be 100 times more useful if duplicate stories from different sources were grouped together and blog posts about those stories were shown.

If this was to happen I would visit Afrigator far more often than I already do – I’m always wondering what bloggers are saying about what is in the news, just right now you’re lucky if you can find out..

Of course it’s not all so bad – Afrigator is doing some great work and despite my complaints I still find great content through the site. They have an excellant collection of blogs and I look forward to seeing what they do with it over time.

Just one last thing: I don’t like the auto-refresh on the home page.

  1. 5 Responses to “AfriGreater?”

  2. By Justin Hartman on Dec 24, 2008 | Reply

    Klips – this is a great post. We are certainly going to look into the points you’ve made here because simply put, we want to provide relevant content to users.

    We’ve been toying with a specific idea for the news section where we link relevant blog posts into news headlines. We’re still working on this functionality but I think it would be great if we can finally get it to work.

    Thanks again for this post!!!

  3. By kilps on Dec 27, 2008 | Reply

    Thanks for the reply :) – it’s always great to hear what people think of your feedback.

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