Golly. It’s looking a little dire at South African blog aggregator Amatomu, which is owned by the Mail & Guardian. There’s niet up on the front page sans this rather woeful message:

Dear Amatomu user

Firstly, apologies for not communicating sooner about the site’s downtime. We were hoping to fix it sooner.

Amatomu has become too expensive for us to maintain and run, as it brings very little revenue, and bears a prohibitive cost for a company whose main product is news.

However, it’s obviously a great little product, and one that deserves to survive. To this end, we’ve offered it to a couple of interested parties. If we have no joy there, we’ll be offering it to the community to run as a community-based service.

Please bear with us as we fix it, and as we go through the process of transferring ownership. We will have clarity within the next five days.

Jason

Technical Manager

Mail & Guardian

Click here to go there. It’s tough out there for everyone as we hit the depths of the recession so we’ll see if someone snaps up Amatomu. I checked in on it reasonably often as it’s a helpful indicator of how your blog is doing (and others) but one does have to wonder about its central weakness: that the aggregation was done by a computer and not people. Watch this space, folks, as Grubstreet has been working on something really fun and useful in just this sphere called Grubstreet.select. All will be revealed soon!

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