ChatterBox on AfricanLoft: A 2nd Generation Content Aggregator

The blogosphere will be useless without interaction between blogs, and probably more useless without hyperlinks. As a blogger have you linked lately…I mean to another blog you dig? If not you need to. It’s a pity there are no good measures of detecting who links to who, well, aside from Technorati, a system that has become very unpredictable lately, but despite its lapses, it’s still a useful tool if just for the purpose of seeing where your links come from.

However, there is also the ChatterBox on AfricanLoft. What ChatterBox does is not only aggregate blog postings and some mainstream articles on Africa, it also show - to the extent possible the “connections” between the aggregated contents, all within a time period.

Yes, not all blogs are aggregated, but for those it tracks, the ChatterBox displays blogs that link to each other (under the “Discussions” header), and it even tries to match the contents of those that do not using some keywords (under “Related item” header). The only caveat is that the link must be fairly “fresh” (links to a fairly dated blog-postings [more than 24 hours] may not show), the linked site must have published RSS feeds, and permit the visit of web crawlers. So if your articles are not showing it may be because of one or some of these reasons. First, check the blogroll to be sure you site is even on file.

Some users have remarked that the contents on ChatterBox appear “noisy”. This noise is nothing but the buzz occurring in the blogosphere at that moment in time, it’s what other aggregators can not show, and it doesn’t happen all the time on ChatterBox. Note: contents updates between every one to two hours, approximately. As I write this piece- 7/2/2007 at 4:51pm, ChatterBox time - the buzz is around the AU summit in Accra, and this has been the pattern since the conference started a day before.

On most day days, the ChatterBox displays very few “real discussions” i.e blogs that linked to other blogs/sites, either as references or to continue and expand the conversation they’d started. This is where ChatterBox comes handy: Who to link and what to write. So if you are unsure where your next link should go, or having a writer’s block and undecided what to write, a visit to ChatterBox may just be what you need to help clear the fog.

Did I mention that ChatterBox comes with historical data i.e. contents are archived (this page needs some css work at the moment)? If desired, one could go back in time to get a sense of what the conversation was. This may have some research/analysis importance to those inclined.