Afrigator, the leading African blog aggregator, has a listing which ranks the top Cameroonian blogs. Although the Cameroonian blogosphere has grown in leaps and bounds in the past couple of years, only 48 Cameroon-related blogs are listed on Afrigator (compared to 5387 South African blogs and 935 from Nigeria) – a fact which highlights the insularity of the Cameroonian blogosphere whose members do not generally seem interested in reaching out to readers beyond the Cameroonian community.
For those who are not familiar with Afrigator, it is, according to its creators,
“a social media aggregator and directory built especially for African digital citizens who publish and consume content on the Web.
You can use Afrigator to index your blog, podcast, videocast or news site (i.e. any site that publishes an RSS feed) and market it to the rest of Africa and the world. You can also use it to discover new sites in the Afrosphere.
Afrigator attempts to use social media tools and technologies to showcase the best digital content that the African continent has to offer, ranging from syndicated news feeds to blog posts, podcasts, videos and images. We invite citizen publishers with African content (or based on the African continent) to submit their sites and then we send clicks back to them. We also scan the Web for African-related tags and aggregate that content in the site.”
Afrigator rankings are based on an average of the following four elements: (1) Unique visits (2) Page views (3) Links from blog posts, and (4) number of blogs that link to your blog.
The list and ranking of Cameroonian blogs reveal the following:
- Two of the top three Cameroonian blogs are owned by expatriates, Our Man in Cameroon and 27 Months
- Of the top 10 Cameroonian blogs, six are in French and 4 in English
- A good number of popular Cameroonian blogs are not registered on Afrigator – Chia Report, nyamnjoh.com, Voice of the oppressed, My African Father, "Un autre regard", gngwane.com, Up Station Mountain Club, etc.
- Although the size of the “Anglophone” and “Francophone” segments of the Cameroonian blogosphere are nearly the same, about 80% of Cameroonian blogs listed on Afrigator are French language blogs; an indication that while French language bloggers are trying to have an impact beyond Cameroon, the majority of Anglophone bloggers are just fine being invisible in the blogosphere and reaching out only to a small and sometimes closed circle of friends, family and admirers
If you are a Cameroonian blogger and would like to reach a much wider/continental audience or be included in statistics on blogging in Africa, then go to Afrigator and register your blog.
Click here for Afrigator's ranking of Cameroonian blogs.
By the way, Afrigator recently launched a micro-blogging service called "Gatorpeeps" which some refer to as Africa's answer to Twitter. Check it out here:
HI DIBUSSI
This is a great post an analysis on Cameroonian blogs on Afrigator. We would obviously love to grow Cameroon blog registrations on Afrigator and I feel the reason only 48 are there is due to a lack of awareness.
Can you perhaps shed some light as to how we can create an awareness amongst other bloggers in Cameroon?
Thanks and keep up the great work!
Posted by: Justin Hartman | May 05, 2009 at 08:48 AM
all bloggers should register on afrogator. Justin, this article is awareness arousing enough. all cameroon bloggers, lets say most read this blog.
Posted by: Christiantian | May 06, 2009 at 08:55 AM
Great analysis as usual, Dibussi.
I'm sure that if some of the Cameroonian blogs you cited, which I also follow (My African Father, Chia Report, Voice of the Oppressed, Un Autre Regard, Up Station Mountain Club, etc) were to register with Afrigator we'd see a serious reshuffling of those rankings.
This post is a step in the right direction.
Posted by: Bill Zimmerman | May 07, 2009 at 06:24 PM
Dibussi: I think they have been listening. The number of blogs listed on Afrigator has increased to close to 70 since you wrote this, and most of the new ones are in English.
Posted by: Ma Mary | May 12, 2009 at 08:34 PM
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