Fundamentalists Among the Hits on Amatomu

Would any of the South African religious bloggers care to make a comment on the fact that positions #1 and #2 on the Amatomu ranking according to hits are currently held by probably the two most religious fundamentalist blogs registered with Amatomu? Fundamentalist resurgence?

Page Impressions Dropping

I’ve just realised that because of the design of the new template Amatomu only registers page impressions from my home page – hence I’ve begun quite a dramatic drop down the ratings. Oh well – I like this template so I’ll have to live with mid-table mediocrity.

Amatomu and the not so ‘South African’ Blogsphere

I always like to see if new people have signed up blogs under the ‘religion‘ category at Amatomu. Its by far the smallest category (26 blogs at present) and so you notice when someone new is added. Today though I noticed something strange – the appearance of a new blog entitled ‘Inspiration and Encouragement’ run by April Lorier. So naturally I went over to have a look. It seemed like a straightforward Christian psychology blog of sorts – nothing out of the ordinary there but then I probed a bit more to find out about April Lorier. This is what her brief bio reads:

“APRIL LORIER- Southern California. An award-winning poet, inspirational author and speaker. A survivor of both child abuse and adult domestic abuse, April inspires women to be all that God designed them to be! She first gained recognition as a children’s rights crusader while successfully fighting for the passage of the Child Abuse and Neglect Reporting Act (CANRA), which was signed into law by Ronald Reagan.”

Notice something strange? The blog has absolutely nothing to do with South Africa. Now there are hundreds of blog aggregators out there for all sorts of categories but Amatomu, as their tagline states, has ‘the south african blogsphere, sorted‘. Do they not have some sort of filter system to check that the blogs they’re tracking really are South African or at least have some sort of relevant contact to South Africa?

Now April’s blog is not really my cup of tea, but I’ve got nothing against April Lorier. The problem is that unless I’m missing something, her blog is not a South African blog nor is it authored by a South African – in which case it shouldn’t be on Amatomu because it doesn’t serve the purposes for which Amatomu exists. What do the other SA bloggers think?

Blogging South African

Yesterday my pastor had some interesting thoughts on immigration in his sermon on the life and times of Joseph in the Genesis narrative. This in light of South Africans listing numerous reasons for wanting to move to places like Australia, New Zealand and the UK. At the top of most of those lists is the crime factor here in SA, and this article from the East Coast Radio Blog just shows some of the horror of the situation. I’m still wondering, as a Christian, whether leaving or not due to crime and corruption in this country is a gospel motivated action. I suppose each individual case needs to be considered.

Elsewhere Dion makes some interesting comments about the ‘recolonization’ of Southern Africa and punk rockers, NOFX, the band that refused to be ‘colonized’ by major record labels since 1983 will be jamming in Cape Town on the 9th November.

Finally, I just discovered a blog tracking site for South African blogs, unlike Amatomu which tracks all the movements in the SA blogsphere, this site, South Africa’s Daily Voices, daily updates the top 15 posts and blogs in SA. How did I find it? Well somehow a little throw away post that I wrote two days ago got ranked inside that top 15 – can you believe it!

Amatomu Gets Religious

Amatomu, the top site for tracking the South African blogsphere has recently added the category of ‘religion‘ to its other categories of life, sport, news, politics etc. etc. Whilst I know ‘religion’ is not exactly the trendiest word in the world at the moment at least it helps us to keep track of other Christian bloggers in South Africa, rather than having to trawl through stacks of other blogs to find the ‘Godbloggers’. If you’re South African and you write a Christian blog why not sign up your blog under the category of ‘religion’. (hint, hint, nudge, nudge)