Afrigator Puts African Content Front and Center

Since digital is universal -- read global -- it;s important that people from everywhere have a clear and enduring voice online. Afrigator, a social media tool designed to help African voices get heard and distributed more broadly, is a great tool for ensuring that the long neglected voice(s) of Africa are heard and understood.

Afrigator describes itself thus:

Afrigator is a social media aggregator and directory built especially for African digital citizens who publish and consume content on the Web.

You can use Afrigator to index your blog, podcast, videocast or news site (i.e. any site that publishes an RSS feed) and market it to the rest of Africa and the world. You can also use it to discover new sites in the Afrosphere.

Afrigator attempts to use social media tools and technologies to showcase the best digital content that the African continent has to offer, ranging from syndicated news feeds to blog posts, podcasts, videos and images. We invite citizen publishers with African content (or based on the African continent) to submit their sites and then we send clicks back to them. We also scan the Web for African-related tags and aggregate that content in the site.

Content is divided by country channels, by category (we’ve developed an organic categorisation algorithm that sorts content into single or multiple categories by scanning it as it’s pulled into the site) and finally by content type. One would be able to filter audio content of a business theme originating from Nigeria, as an example. Our goal is to include geotagging to drill down search possibilities even further and improve our data on where our content is coming from.

Content on Afrigator is divided into several broad channels:

News: Like it says on the tin.
Blogs: A Technorati like directory of blogs with the common denominator of African voices
Photos: A community photo book indexed by country and topic, offering a stream of the latest snaps 24/7.
Video: Similar to the photo offering, but featuring site, sound and motion content.
Hot topics: A directory f posts and content organized by key topic.

It also offers the proverbial "My gator..." section that lets you customize a page to your interests and have RSS-based content delivered to you on an ongoing basis.

What's important about Afrigator is the idea rather than new fangled technological offerings. We should all be thankful that African voices now have a platform that helps to amplify their long-neglected perspective in our global digital environment.