“Dear friends on the South African blogosphere, it is with great pride and a degree of trepidation that I announce the public alpha test of Amatomu.com,” writes Vincent Maher, officially announcing the launching of Amatomu. Blogger Tyler Reed, unaware that Amatomu was in a closed alpha testing phase, wrote about it before it went public alpha. According to Vincent, it was a code on on a test blog, which led Tyler to discover it: It was always going to be hard to keep something like this a secret, but those we invited managed to stay quiet for more than a week,” he says. Word got out when South African blogger and Global Voices author Tyler Reed, who was unaware of the initial secrecy, discovered code on a test blog and wrote a review of the site on his own blog, www.tylerreed.co.za. Amatomu is a new, dynamic South African blog aggregator hosted by The Mail & Guardian Online. Some bloggers have called it “South Africa's Technorati”. The Mail & Guardian‘s online strategists and bloggers, Vincent Maher and Mathew Buckland are the key figures behind Amatomu. “This has been more than a website for Vinnie and I, but a passion,” writes Mathew Buckland: It was part of what we call our “Lab” projects at M&G (modelled on the Google Labs concept), which we have created via a rapid development process without the usual project plans, workflow diagrams, specs, storyboards etc etc… It’s not for the faint hearted. Amatomu is something that has been developed on weekends, early mornings and that has had Vince and I monitoring it late into the evenings from our homes and even Vince rushing to the office on a particular late Sunday evening. What has been particularly great, is to see the same amount of passion for it by the local blogging community. The name Amatomu, which means “reins” in isiZulu, was the subject of considerable debate before it was eventually chosen: Amatomu, the name we eventually settled on, was hotly debated. The name means “reins” in isiZulu and I was a strong proponent of it because of the original desire to steer more mainstream traffic towards the blogosphere. Matthew was concerned that the name might imply some sort of punitive element but I managed to win that argument, only just, by explaining the difference between a crop, a bit and the reins (not that I know much about equestrian sports LOL). Amatomu was designed with the primary objective of providing an organized perspective of the South African blogosphere. Sorting it out: The general idea was that we wanted to provide some sort of destination for our readers that would give them an organized perspective of the South Afrian blogosphere, and offer some useful services to bloggers without treading on the toes of existing services like Muti, which we support completely. One sentence describes Amatomu: “The South African blogosphere, sorted.” Ethan Zuckerman explains the sorting: The sorting refers to the site’s ranked lists, which list blogs in terms of their popularity in terms of unique visitors. Amatomu is able to calculate this by asking participating bloggers to put a badge on their sites – by analyzing how many users see this badge, the system can calculate how many readers see the blog. Features: Graphing the buzz, calculating rankings, tracking traffic Amatomu ranks, categorizes and sorts out South African blogs using criteria: Tag Cloud, Top 100 Blogs (using unique readers as main indicator), Hot Right Now, Trends, Blog Search, Latest Blog Posts and Blog Charts. According to Mathew Buckland, they have recently enabled Amatomu to graph the buzz in the South African blogosphere: We’ve added more graphing on amatomu.com’s search results. It tracks activity of search keywords over a 30-day period and then graphs the buzz. These are new graphs we added together with the others launched on overall blogosphere trends and individual blogger profiles on top posts etc… Another feature tracks traffic sent to one's blog from Amatomu: Today we added a little somethign extra to Amatomu that tracks how much raffic we send to your blog. That figure is now listed on your stats page and after a week we will start graphing that too, for your visual pleasure. At the moment my blog gets about 15% of its traffic from Amatomu and that’s roughly the figure I hear from others too. Keep in mind that once we go public with the site and link it from the Mail & Guardian Online that figure will increase dramatically. Vincent explains how rankings are calculated: When you register you’re asked to put a little bit of code in your template. What that does is it tracks the pages and unique visitors to your site. We’re still working on the way that tracking happens but it seems to be working fairly well so far.