southIfrica.com

I’ve finally finished my South African News aggregator website. It’s a website that collates news items from various news sources from South Africa and puts them on one page. You click through to the actual news story website if you want to read more than just the short excerpt.

Why South Africa and why do this?, I hear you ask. Well firstly I thought the domain name was funny so I bought it on a whim. I overheard a South African talking about his country in a pub and it did sound like Ifrica, but maybe Efrica is more accurate?

Then I was left with what I wanted to achieve with the actual site. Greedily I just wanted to earn money from advertising and get as high up certain online search facilities for the phrase “South Africa”. I suppose thats what every other commercial site wants. South Africa is hosting the 2010 World Cup so that gives me three years to climb those rankings and get a piece of that action. The World Cup will be a huge boost for the country and it could be possible to sell the domain name for a very nice profit.

Now I had to work out what to actually do with the site (I’m sure I’ve thought about this the wrong way round). I was toying around with RSS feeds and I suddenly thought of making one place where all the news from South Africa could be screened on just one page. Add some local bloggers and we have a site! Thats what’s up there now.

Over 2007 I’ll keep tabs on its search rankings, the amount of bandwidth the special Magpie RSS aggregator engine uses and the visitor statistics. If it does well then I’ll probably work on stage two of the site which would have the ability for people to select their local cities, choose sports and businesses, nominate their favourite blogs etc.. A little more interaction. We’ll see.

Oh, and if you know any South Africans please send them the site URL and ask them to forward it to their friends, thanks!