Jun
19
Written by Lester Hein
Nov
11
Written by Lester Hein
It’s a very exciting day for us her at the Afrigator office…today we’re launching one of the (many) projects we’ve been frantically working on for the last month or two. Today we are proud to launch Adgator, an African blog network that will allow bloggers to make money by displaying advertising on their blogs.
Why would we want to create an ad network I hear you ask? Well, it’s simple. We know that for many bloggers, writing is a passion and an outlet. But we also know that it takes up many long hours and that sometimes is gets difficult to keep going with no real reward (other than the satisfaction of your content being read and interacted with by others). So we’ve built a system that allows bloggers to earn some money from their blogs.
Since it’s still early days for the system, we’ve invited a small group of bloggers to try out the system and be the first to start making some money from their blogs. If you would like to join us, have a look at www.adgator.co.za for more info.
Justin has done a pretty cool blog post explaining Adgator a little more, so hop on over to his blog and have a read.
Oct
22
Written by Lester Hein
Picture by Simphiwe Nkwali, The Times
Xenophobia is out of the headlines but not out of our heads. I received a call from an Afrigator blogger a few days ago asking if we could help her with the fallout from the xenophobia attacks in Cape Town. We’ll call her Leigh for now.
Here’s the story:
One of Leigh’s employees is a Zimbabwean woman who lives in Khayalitsha in Cape Town. We’ll call her Gloria. Gloria was traumatized by the xenophobic attacks that raged through Cape Town in months gone by and is still understandably traumatized. It’s affecting her work, and it pains Leigh to see someone close to here have to go through this. And what’s worse is that Leigh doesn’t know how to help Gloria.
She needs someone to talk to. Someone to counsel her. Someone to help her. But they don’t know where to find this someone. And neither do we.
So we’re asking for your help. We’d like to help Leigh and Gloria find someone who can counsel them and help them get through this difficult time.
If you know of any counseling centres or programs who would be able to help, please add it in the comments section below or send me a mail to lester(at)afrigator.com and I’ll pass the information to Leigh and Gloria.
It’s not often that we get to make a difference to the lives of others, so let’s take this chance to help.
Oct
20
Written by Justin Hartman
Ever wondered who the top female bloggers are in Africa, or which women you should be following online? We did, so we compiled the following list. For us compiling this list was an interesting excercise as we didn’t explicity know which blogs are authored by woman but we went on a mission to find out.
While this list is not the be all and end all it does provide some interesting insight into which female blogs you could/should be watching. It’s clear that South African female bloggers dominate the list but I am very pleased to see Nigeria, Kenya, Eqypt, Uganda and Ethiopia make it on the list.
Caveats
The ranking is taken directly from the top blogs section as ranked by Afrigator’s unique ranking system which takes into consideration page views, unique visits, links from blog posts and finally links from blogs to formulate an overall rank on Afrigator.
This list is accurate as at Friday 17 October and is subject to change almost immediately. The reason for this is that our ranking system updates every four hours and this will affect overall ranking as well as ranking in each specific country.
Oct
13
Written by Lester Hein
Last week I was introduced to the concept behind the BarCamp movement.
Don’t look at me like that – just because I hadn’t heard of it before doesn’t mean I’m a bad person. Anyway, once Justin and Stii had explained BarCamp to me I was pretty excited –I figured I’d blow the whole year’s marketing budget sponsoring BarCamp events all over the continent. I mean, here we have groups of people gathering to discuss and learn in an open environment – what’s not to love about this! And since we’re Africa’s best social media aggregator, it makes perfect sense for us to come on board as a sponsor, right? The problem, it seems is that this group is often microscopically small. In some cases, it’s not so much people meeting as it is one person there. Or at least that’s what it looks like. Right now it’s 5 days before the BarCamp Dakar event, and there’s not one attendee registered. Bummer.
From a business perspective, it won’t make any sense for us to sponsor this event, so even though we’d love to get on board and help, we’re a little tied down by the fact that there will be no-one there to wear our cool t-shirts. Now, it could be that Dakar is an isolated incident and that there are other BarCamps in Africa going on all the time that are packed to the rafters – I don’t know. Are there?
BarCamp Johannesburg’s Wiki shows that there were 26 attendees registered for the event – not a bad result. But my suspicion is that there were probably more people on the day who didn’t register for the event. Did any readers out there make it to this event? How did it go? Please let us know, or better yet – write a blog post about your BarCamp experience for all of Africa to see.
So now the question rattling around in my brain is this – how can we help to raise awareness around the BarCamp events BEFORE they take place, rather than simply taking up space on a t-shirt once the 3 people registered get there? I’m sure that between all the smart folks here at Afrigator (that would be you) we can think of a way to get these amazing events the support they deserve.
What do you think?
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