The Afrigator / 24.com Integration - what it means

So the big news today is the announcement we made via our blog about the integration between 24.com Blogs and Afrigator.

For a few months we’ve been working with Alistair Fairweather and his dev team at 24.com to try and make this work and I think that as a phase one we’ve done pretty well.

I really believe that this is a significant step in the social media space in Africa. For the first time one of the largest media companies in Africa have opened up their doors to work with an independent and at the same time we’re gaining further credibility within the industry.

From an Afrigator perspective this step moves us closer to becoming the authoritative figure within the space as we are now able to easily aggregate blogs from a portal that was once closed off to the outside world. The 24.com platform is by far the largest of its kind in Africa and it now opens the doors for us to apply a similar model to other blogging platforms.

In the blogging space in South Africa we’ve noticed two very different schools. One is the early-adopter space that are generally all members of Afrigator already while the other is the niche, closed communities that are often much larger than the early-adopter one. These closed communities, while much larger, are not really aware of what’s happening outside their space and I think it’s safe to say that 24.com Blogs is one of them.

By integrating with Afrigator, 24.com bloggers are now exposed to a very different audience than before. In addition these bloggers are now able to get detailed stats about their blog which is something that was not possible prior to this move.

I am of the belief that early-adopters need to be exposed to the closed communities in just the same way. There are some extremely valuable and influential bloggers within the 24.com network and we hope that this integration helps shift perceptions and encourage bloggers to interact outside of their normal environments.

I guess time will tell what happens but for now I’m really pleased to be involved in helping to change the landscape.