Amatomu link-love tops one million

Amatomu, created by the Mail & Guardian Online's Vincent Maher and Matthew Buckland, gathers content from the blogosphere and makes it centrally searchable. It also categorises and ranks blogs and provides basic web analytics for bloggers.

"As a vehicle for promoting clicks, the user to click ratio is well over 200%, which says a lot for the quality of the content being produced by local bloggers and the desire of the audience to read it," says Maher, Amatomu developer and strategist at the Mail & Guardian Online.

Adds Buckland: "Amatomu's clickthrough statistic is the statistic that is key. The point of Amatomu.com is not to horde traffic ala web 1.0 style but to send traffic back out and build its community: the blogosphere."

The two report that the combined traffic of local blogs Amatomu.com which now tracks is nearing 3.5 million page impressions a month.

"Bloggers, as a combined force, are gathering the same volume of traffic as mid-size online news web site with around 76% of the traffic in local readership, which is excellent," says Maher.

Maher and Buckland are confident that as Amatomu continues to grow, the local blogging community will enjoy increasing traffic and recognition for their work.