Digital News South Africa

International recognition for SA digital initiatives

South Africa can certainly be proud of its digital developers. Recently, African social media aggregator Afrigator was voted one of the Top 10 International Products for 2008 and received an honourable mention in the Top 10 RSS and Syndication Products of 2008 list by ReadWriteWeb, and Tyler Reed of social and mobile media marketing agency Younique was named as one of mobileYouth's Top 20 Youth Marketing Bloggers.

ReadWriteWeb is a blog that provides web technology news, reviews and analysis. It began publishing in 2003 and is now the 14th most widely read and respected blog in the world. Afrigator competed with popular Web 2.0 products such as Netvibes, Zoho, Google Reader, Feedburner and Yahoo! Pipes.

Justin Hartman, MD of Afrigator, told Bizcommunity.com: "Being featured as one of the Top 10 International Products for 2008 is a massive achievement for us. It is every technology startup's dream to be featured on ReadWriteWeb and we've managed two different accolades in less than a week.

"Competing with top global products validates the work we've been doing over the last 18 months. It also highlights how important African social media has become not only on the continent but also world-wide," added Hartman.

The ReadWriteWeb Top 10 lists are part of a series of articles that have appeared in the Technology section of the New York Times: Top 10 International Products for 2008 accolade and Honourable mention

Youth blogger

International recognition for SA digital initiatives

MobileYouth provides youth marketing insights to assist addressing challenges around building and marketing youth brands.

Said 20-year-old Reed to Bizcommunity.com, “It's a real honor to be mentioned on MobileYouth. I spend a lot of time talking about youth and mobile marketing and personally, it means that I must be doing something right. I am truly grateful.”

In South Africa, the youth are very active on their mobile, evident with services such as MXit and Facebook Mobile. However, there is a lot more content out there on the web that can be scaled down for mobile consumption.

One of Reed's recent initiatives is MobilePress, a simple plugin for popular blogging software WordPress that renders the content found on the blog for mobile devices. It makes reading blogs more convenient on a small screen, but also a lot more cost-effective (in terms of data transfer) and accessible.

According to Reed, so far MobilePress has had almost 6000 downloads and has been featured on numerous local and international blogs.

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