The world wide web is constantly changing, content is being created, stored, modified, categorized (tagged) and archived at a rapid rate. Due to this rapid change, content gets lost or forgotten about just as quick. So how does one keep track of all this content? A simple answer, you don’t. Instead you create a home for the various types of content. Let me use 5 prime examples:
- YouTube
A site for video content. - Flickr
A site for photo and image content. - Froogle
A site which allows people to search for goods they can purchase online. - Technorati
A site which tracks blog posts and blogs throughout the world. - Blogger
A site that offers people free blogs. [what is a blog?]
YouTube, Flickr, Technorati and Blogger contain South African content and content from South Africans, but all this content gets lost within the vastness of these sites. They are all international so therefore the content comes from all over the world. South Africa does not produce as much content as the rest of the world, which means the content we do produce needs a home in order to prevent it from becoming lost among the rest of the worlds content. So we do just that, we create sites for our content.
South Africa is starting to boast some really impressive sites based on international models. I prefer not to call them clones, they are built on foreign concepts / models. They are fundamental in the growth of the South African internet. Mike Stopforth has already expressed his need for a South African version of Technorati.
South Africa already has a few localised services like the few mentioned above.
- Video Services
Zoopy, MyVideo and TWAC. You can read my review of these three sites over here. - Image & Photo Services
24.com Albums and Zoopy. I have not really used the photo / image sharing capabilities of these two sites so I cannot fairly comment on them. They are definitely worth a try. - Shopping Search Services
Jump Shopping. This is a really powerful tool and this site is growing from strength to strength. Perhaps you should do this years Christmas shopping through them. - Blogging Services
24.com blogs, M&G Blogmark and iBlog. I am also not going to comment on these services at this point in time as they all differ and have many positives and negatives. - Social Bookmarking Services
Blik and Muti. I use Muti often. It has only gone from strength to strength, its improvements are really starting to put this site on the map in Africa. There has also been some speculation that if 24.com had to start something similar it would kill almost all other bookmarking services in South Africa. I tend to disagree because the content circles in South Africa are too small, a lot of 24.com’s own content would be published on the service as well as its direct competitors such as IOL and Mail & Guardian Online to name but a few. This would cause them to most probably filter content from these sites, taking away user’s power to control the importance of content and would leave them in the firing line. Just one of many reasons I can think of.
Content is valuable, some has more worth to others and some not but if we want to protect, distribute and share that content we need to store and categorize it properly and in the right places where it would be most relevant.
Tags: web 2.0
Tyler, I couldn’t agree more with your analysis. The simple fact is that much of what Africa needs is already developed, there’s room for customization, but the model is already there.
Muti is a perfect example of this, we are seeing it morph before our eyes into a more “African” version of the popular news networking sites Digg and Reddit.
Hash: You’re spot on. The model is there and all we have to do is customize it and adapt it for African / South African use.
Tyler, this is an awesome post! *clap clap*
Hi Gents, if I could point you to a new site which will hopefully add something to the SA Web and the discussion above. Both are still in very early beta but we felt that the best way to build something relevant was to involve people as early as possible.
Gargoyle is to be a search engine targeted at the SA and African Blogosphere with probably a fair overlap into the SA and African web in general just by the nature of links. It will not be a random crawler however but rather targeted at sites submitted by the community. Initially it was seeded by sites posted by people registered for the 27dinner events. Then part of Gargoyle is Knowledge Bank which I personally find more challenging if more geeky, an attempt at a semantic categorization of the data as that being searched by the search engine itself. The plan is to open the content Knowledge Bank to the community as we go along as well.
Peter
Peter: I’m not even indexed on Gargoyle.
Hi Tyler, you are, it happens manually, I added you at the time but had not run the crawl yet
Hi Tyler
Thanks for your very kind comments about muti and a great post in general!
Peter: Hi 5
Neville: Thanks