Feb07
24
Keo.co.za - The Home Of SA Cricket?
Love him or hate him, you gotta hand it to him - Mark Keohane is one smart dude.
Long before I was trying to sell social media to South African companies… actually, scratch that. Long before I ever blogged a thing. Nope, scratch that too. Long before I had even heard the word blog (and I wager most of SA’s current blogging fraternity are the same), Mark had registered a Typepad account and had begun to build an online media empire out of South Africa’s love for rugby, and a tidbit of publicity he picked up from exposing Strauli’s infamous antics.
Us proud geeks like to argue that his site is not a ‘real’ blog, but the fact is that Keo.co.za is as real and authentic a blog as blogs get. Let’s look at the criteria for what a blog is as outlined on the SA Blog Awards home page…
“A ‘weblog’ is defined as a page with dated entries.” Check. Keo.co.za is this, but so is www.mg.co.za (the Mail & Guardian’s homepage), so Keo.co.za could be a news site.
I’d like to believe that one of the characteristics of all blogs is interactivity in the form of comments (and for the more technically enabled, permalinks, trackbacks, etc. - all interactivity enablers). Check, check, check. Seth Godin doesn’t allow comments, but Keo.co.za has all that - multiple authors, categories, reverse chronological order, regular posts… pretty much everything a blog can be defined by. Technorati acknowledges Keo.co.za as a blog and when we look at the Alexa info for the site, it’s staggering. Check out the following Alexa graph:
I’ve compared a few of my mate’s blogs against Mark’s. Vinny, Vincent and Tertia are all pretty significant local bloggers. As you can see, only Vinny can hold a semblance of a candle to Mark (admittedly, Tertia’s numbers don’t seem to be appearing??).
Not only is Mark getting hundreds of comments on each posts, he is earning some decent ad revenue from pretty cool sponsors. Now, he is expanding the Keo.co.za empire beyond the realm of the oval ball and calling it the ‘home of South African rugby AND cricket fans’. Not surprising, considering March 13th sees the first game of the 2007 Cricket World Cup, and thousands of his rugby-crazy fans are also by default cricket-crazy. It is clear from his Alexa stats that when the respective sports are in season (as rugby is at the moment with the super popular Super 14 series), he does well. In 2007, a year of Rugby and Cricket World Cups, Mark should be anticipating a bumper blog fiesta.
Mark is also hiring new staff, so if you have a knack and a passion for SA cricket and rugby, check this out.
Can we still deny that Keo is one of South Africa’s most influential, if not the most influential, blog? For me, perhaps the biggest motivation for my praise of Mark’s site is the fact that arguably 99% of his readers don’t know they’re reading a blog at all…
Hey Mike
I’m not sure that I’d classify keo.co.za as a blog, it’s more like a blog network (similar to http://www.revenews.com). I suppose, if you had to, you could categorize them as follows:
1. Single Author Blogs (Mine, yours, etc)
2. Multi-Author Blogs (Same organisation - Keo?)
3. Network Blogs (a bigger version of 2 - Multi Organisations).
4. Website (Engadget is no longer a blog, realistically).
Also, about 40% of my readers access my blog content through RSS & Email (which is not included in the Alex stats) - which I heavily promote above the fold on my blog (and so do you) . So the traffic numbers in Alexa actually result in cumulative growth (i.e. people start reading the content in their RSS readers, and not through my website) - I think in Keo’s case, his cumulative readership is reflected in the Alexa stats, hence the steady growth due to the fact that he does not have an RSS feed (or rather, I couldn’t find one on the homepage), so this would result in higher Alex pageviews (people have to go back to the site).
I wouldn’t rely too much on those Alexa numbers in terms of reach or community, but they are what they are and all your other points are pretty much valid.
Hye Vin, thanks for the comment. A site with multiple authors is still very much a blog. Techcrunch, Read/Write Web, and local fav’s Ideate and Joblog have multiple authors. Blog networks are still made up of blogs.
In terms of RSS, my RSS readership is much less than yours, Feedburner shows just less than 200 subs on average, which is a smaller fraction of my readership hence the Alexa views. But even with RSS, Keo, would still beat us into the ground just from a participation perspective. It’s a hard pill to swallow, but Keo is SA’s most prolific blogger.
His feed is http://www.keo.co.za/feed/atom/.
Hey if you wanna compare Alexa stats then gottaquirk takes both of you and certainly dances with Keo.
But for the likes of Vinny, Mike and Quirk, Alexa is likely to do us a lot more justice than it will Keo. If you lay Quirk.biz stats onto this graph you’ll see why we shouldn’t put too much stock in Alexa.
I’m with Mark, Keo is a blog and it thrashes the lot of us!
Agreed. Our blogs are never likely to hit the mainstream, which is what Keo does. We’re far more niche and our the level of intellect required to understand what we’re writing about, it probably double than the average Rugby Fan
Agreed Vinny even though our use of grammar and tyops in comennts match the average rugby fans
Haha Rafiq. Interestingly enough, my blog ranks # 18,560 on Technorati, and Keo.co.za is around #71,473.
I WIN
[...] Thomas Friedman’s “The World is Flat“, really resounded with me this weekend. I was reading a post by Mike Stopforth on some of South Africa’s top bloggers, where he regarded me as one of them and did a quick traffic comparison with Alexa. I proceeded to review my weblogs, and although technically, this may be true, only about 3% of my traffic is from South Africa - primarily because our business focus is global and there is a lot more traffic internationally by comparison. Also, given that my site is hosted in the USA, my entries don’t even show up in Google.co.za (I need to get around to fixing this - any suggestions?). Share This [...]
Dude, change my url to http://www.tertia.org!
Keo.co.za is the first thing I click on everytime I check out my newsreader. It subscribes to all the criteria for what, in my opinion, a blog is all about:
1. It’s well-written.
2. It’s topical.
3. It’s updated frequently (Not sure there is an SA blog that is more up-to-date).
4. It’s pulls no punches - unlike many news sites which have all the bureaucratic hurdles that prevent them from saying it like it is.
5. It’s interactive (I noted one post, about Skinstad’s imminent return, had over 1200 comments!)
As to whether it’s a blog or not, I think the loose conversational style separates it from News24 or IOL or the like.
Nice post, Mike.
Andrew Symonds is the most patriotic cricketer compared to KP who desserted his country to play for England, yet we still hear him moan and whine about being excluded from South African cricket. Andrew Symonds on the other we have never heard him complain, the fact that he was dominating the English County years ago and was worthy of playing for Australia, but due to the fact that the Assiues had players like the Waugh brother, Michael Bevan and many others. He was offered a chance to play for England but unlike the latter he chose to turn down the offer and wait for “CHANCE” that one day he’ll play for the Australian cricket team. Through patience and hardwork he finally achieved his childhood dream. MUCH LOVE AND RESPECT FOR THE MAN
[...] The SA blogosphere is buzzing with all the activity around the 2007 Blog Awards. Now just the other day I was talking about Keo.co.za and the need to recognise it as a significant force in the SA blogosphere (and I’d love to think that my post had an impact on it being selected for Blog of the Year), but have we collectively forgotten about one of the most prominent SA blogs in the world altogether? [...]
Thanks for sharing