If you’ve entered the site through http://appfrica.net or http://appfrica.net/blog lately you’ll notice that the front page has changed significantly.

It now looks more like a syndicated publication or web magazine would. This is to help people sort through all the content that get’s published here as the site continues to grow and evolve. Take a look at the screen shots below for a review.

New Layout

The site looks very different when navigating here through the home page. You’ll now find all the most relevant data and newest articles one click away. This includes Industry News, Featured Content, Editorials, Interviews, Mobile stories and Web articles. You’ll also find the most popular articles of all time right on the front page. I noticed when I was looking through my search logs people seemed to be trying to find the same content over and over again. This should help save them time.

Hot Topics Around Africa

If you’ll remember, I used to aggregate a number of popular Africa related blogs on the front page. This was to share all the news that I don’t cover and to help drive traffic to their sites. Because Appfrica is a ‘blog network’ of it’s own, a few people were confused and thought all those blogs (WhiteAfrican, TumbuktuChronicls, African IT News, BBC Africa etc.) were part of our network. So that area is gone. Instead what I’ve done is created a space called “Hot Topics” that aggregates all the most popular content on the web related to Africa. Each entry is then ranked using an algorithm that cross-references the number of Diggs, the number of Delicious tags and the number of Google Reader shares.

This was created using AideRSS and the Open Africa OPML file I gave away a few weeks ago. Only the most popular content makes it to the feed and of those 20 or so posts, only the top 10 make it to this page. The numbers represent each article’s ‘Post Rank’ for a quick visual of how popular each is. The links will take you directly to that content on the website they belong to.

Advertisements and Sponsors

The last new thing you’ll notice is that companies can now advertise on Appfrica.net. The amount of time and resources that I put into the blog are considerable and I feel this is a good way to promote regional businesses while keeping my efforts sustainable. If you’d like to find out more about purchasing ads on Appfrica.net visit the Sponsor page. The only stipulation is that your company or group have a presence on continent.

About the Author: Jonathan Gosier (Founder) is an American-born software developer, writer and social entrepreneur. He currently lives in Kampala, Uganda where he is working on two fronts: to encourage western businesses and investors to engage African entrepreneurs and to encourage the adoption of computers, programming and use of the internet in the developing regions of Africa. He is a huge advocate for promoting the ways in which a semantic web will benefit emerging economies in the world.

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