For those of you who don’t know, Afrigator is a blog aggregator catering to the whole of Africa. A blog aggregator is as I can best describe it a collection of blogs with newest posts and a long list of all available blogs. They site is currently running a competition where the person with the best suggestions on how to improve the site wins a cool R1000.
Here are my suggestions:
1) My biggest issue with Afrigator is that whenever I go there the newest blog post or podcast are often something from Ghana or Kenya. While it’s great to occasionally get the exposure of opinion from another country I do think that being able to segment the site by country would be a big help. This would particularly helpful as often there is a language issue when posts are in French or an African language.
2) Afrigator is incredibly political. What I mean by this is that often on the front page there are only political related posts. I think users should be able to customise their home page. So basically you’ll be able to choose which category of posts are predominantly on the front page. I guess the best way to describe this would be an iGoogle kind of interface. If I could go on to Afrigator and have different areas of interest and other cool widgets such as local weather and news I would definitely put it as my home page.
Well that’s all I have for the moment. Could someone please put this on Muti for me and people can go vote like crazy for my incredible ideas!
Well done to Afrigator though, lots of cool potential.
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I especially like your first suggestion. What Afrigator could do, is look at the IP address and figure out what country the user is from, and then configure them automatically to have that country’s posts at the top.
I think these are really good suggestions. Gonna vote for you on muti
Thanks guys!
@South African: It is very disconcerting when a web site makes assumptions about who you are based on your IP address.
If you are in a different country, you would not like your usual websites to behave as if you are from that country. For example, just because you are in Kenya doesn’t mean you are Swahili and have only a marginal interest in SA.
Websites can adapt what they present based on user preferences.
I definitely think doing the segmentation via IP could cause the troubles you speak about alleman. I reckon a better option would be to give users the choice.