For the cognescenti of Afrigator.com, my title might be a non-starter. I know for a fact that fellow ghanablogging.com bloggers like David Ajao have waxed lyrical about afrigator's peeps (akin to twitter) for example. One thing that must be said about David Ajao, also, i sthat consistently for the past couple of months, he has been ranked number one on afrigator rankings -- at least as far as blogs in Ghana is concerned. Off-late, he moved to number one, but has been up-staged by Joy Fm journalist Ato Kwamena Dadzie, who joined afrogator only last week.My biggest beef, though, is with some of the entries in the top 20.
Simply click on the images to get a bigger picture. When you do, you will get a better sense of what I'm about to write.Let's start with Koranteng's Toli, which was last updated in March 2009. How on earth can it still be ranked number 6?
Secondly, EVABZ -- at number 7 -- had NO posts about Ghana! The last eight posts were on random issues--not on anything to do with Ghana. How on earth was it able to rank so high?
Third, MZREPORT.com seems to be written by a sexy, smart young woman who writes occasionally about Africa. Nothing specific about Ghana. How does her blog manage to rank #9 on afrigator blogs in Ghana? Unclear whether she's even Ghanaian.
Fourth, GHANAPUNDIT is a blog doing the easy cut-and-paste job on a very regular basis. To constitute good blogging, frankly, is a fallacy. Any amateur can do cut-and-paste every day. Where's the analysis of the posts you put up. The regularity clearly means that it's higher on the rankings--and as it's blogging about Ghana, well, you can do your maths about how it managed to get to #11. Though I am happy to see it has fallen a great deal from last week when it was ranked #2/3 for a couple of days!
Fifth, NDC Corruption is eponymous in the sense that the name speaks for itself: it's all about posts touching on alledged corruption by the NDC from both private and public Ghanaian press. It's also mostly a cut-and-paste job. To be ranked #19 is perhaps a vindication of my anger, considering how last two weeks, it was hovering around 2 and 3 for a few days!
I don't know what monitoring and evaluating afrigator is doing about blogs under countries, but it strikes me that it might need to do some significant revision of what "constitutes" Ghanaian blogs. Is it merely a cut-and-paste job from papers about Ghana, or entries about Ghana or on Ghanaian life?
8 comments:
I am glad you also saw it and decided to raise your concern. Its been high a time, the webmaster take a good look at the blogs they rate for Ghana... What monitoring tool is been used at Afrigator.com. Is there a way, they could come out and explain some points to us?
Damn, i hadn't checked afrigator in a while but seriously, today's rankings look waaaay off as you say. I find that many of the blogs don't have content that is relevant to Ghanaians or even about Ghana. I'm shocked to see how much the rankings have changed since abt 2 mths ago when I last checked. I always thought it was wierd that "my heart's in accra" was ranked so highly when it didn't talk all that regularly about Accra or Ghana. Maybe I should blog about it too. Perhaps if enough of us blog about it, it will catch their attention.
I wonder what kind of criteria they look at when they rank these blogs. It's strange though because I'm kinda torn about whether the blogs listed as appealing to Ghanaians should necessarily have content about Ghana. For example, I have 2 blogs listed on afrigator and one of them is a personal blog. Whether or nor I choose to blog about Ghana is up to me. However, I do feel that if they are going to list and rank "Ghana blogs" then some element of Ghana should definitely be present. I feel these rankings are lazy and they need to make clear the things they consider when ranking. Good call for raising this issue though.
Ha! I thought I saw this article and though it was going to be a case of sour grapes but really well put.
David made a post about being number 1 on afrigator only a few weeks ago and someone from there responded about them "fiddling" with the code recently so that is what is causing all the bouncing around.
I think it's currently based mostly on page views that's why blogs that havent had a post for a while still remain in the top.
It just so means that someone on a hiatus is consistently getting more hits than thee rest of us.
The reason why atokd for instance might have jumped right to the top could only be explained by them only using a short history of page hits to do the ranking. If it were cumulative, blogs that had been around for a while will always be at the top [a bit like brazil and the #1 fifa ranking until the rules were changed in 2006]
I dont think they use any of the blogs content to do any ranking so MZREPORT's page for instance will consistently rank high even though she doesnt really blog about ghana.
The other bit they use seems to do with links from other blogs to you within afrigator itself and from blogrolls.
Cant say how much weight is behind all of these mechanisms but one thing is for sure: I like being in the top 20 at least :p
I doubt you'll ever be able to keep blogs like NDC Corruption and Ghana Pundit off the list unless they manually put exceptions in their code for them.
They do a lot of copy and paste but some people seem to love it. And whatever brings the traffic in is good. [for afrigator too]
Now let's see what other tweaks they make when they've seen your entry.
@Mac-Jordan: so my eyes were not playing tricks on me on how it was shifting almost every day! I might have to consider sending them a link to this post, though if someone re-tweeted this, it might go some way? afrigator must be on twitter, right?
@Esi--I'm with you about more people blogging. Nothing ever works without monitoring and regulation. Remember Leeman's?;-)
@Sankofa--nice to see you here! I have desisted from putitng my personal blog (http://ekbensah.wordpress.com out of afrigator, cos I rarely write about Ghana there. It's easy for anyone to place the badge and have afrigator pick up anything the write about--without recourse to the Ghanaian content. More work for afrigator, I guess?
@Faf--many thanks for your enlightenment--especially on the fifa rankings! Helps put things in perspective. Am with you on page views, but it's clear their monitoring mechanism must needs be strengthened. Congratulations on being in the top 20: at least you blog about Ghana, so kudos!!;-)
Thanks for all your comments!
Hi Emmanuel,
Sorry for only responding now! This slipped through the cracks! :( Yes, we're on Twitter. Even better would be adding our individual accounts:
@stii
@justinhartman
@adelezev
Okay, now, I'm not sure if you've read this indepth explanation about how the ranking works. Maybe it is too technical? Anyway, have a read and tell me.
http://stii.co.za/afrigator/whats-in-a-afrigator-ranking/
As I said, it changes frequently when the ranking scripts run. It resets every Sunday night so there may very well be big variations early in the week. That is quite normal.
As far as determining what blogs are Ghanaian, we leave that to the users. When a blogger submits his blog, he selects the country. Maybe we're not 100% clear on what determines what a blog's country classification is and that may well cause confusion. We find that more often than not, you'll find two kinds of bloggers.
1. Bloggers that resides in that said country. The blog itself might not be about the country, but the blogger should be!
2. Expats that blog about the country. This normally means that the blog qualifies on the basis that the blog is about the said country.
If you find that there is blogs that does not qualify, feel free to let us know! We'll definitely look into it. You can mail us at support[at]afrigator.com
Another issue is that we did have a problem recently with our ranking algorithm. This has been resolved. See:
http://blog.afrigator.com/2009/09/21/blog-ranking-changes/
I have to say, this is not the first time the issue of blogs that hadn't been updated in a while came up. I'll definitely look into this issue as it certainly is very, very valid. In fact, I'll look into this today still!
Guys, we're open for suggestions. We'll have a good and hard look at some of your suggestions mentioned here.
Keep well,
Stii
Hi guys,
We're now excluding all blogs from ranking that has not been updated (have a new post) within the last 30 days.
Can you maybe help me to confirm this? Let me know if it is working or not? Would be greatly appreciated!
It's good to know someone cares after all. I still have my reservations about the ranking algorithm though. Why should I be ranked high only when I am linked by blogs on Afrigator??? What about the blogs that are not on Afrigator?? Such links should count too!!
Post a Comment