Last week, I wrote an article here about a Web 2.0 Blogs Aggregator for Nigeria, and this got some reactions from a few social media players. (See comments on the post here). I must admit that I didn’t realise that Nigeria had a blogs aggregator, NigerianBloggers.com, and when it was pointed to me, I decided to take a close look at the site. The site was created by Kayode Muyibi of Nairahost.

At first glance, I didn’t think the site was web 2.0ish enough even though it was built under an open source package called Gregarious as well as web applications such as XHTML 1.0 and CSS 2.0. So my argument was that if the site must be considered a Web 2.0 blogs aggregator, then it had to have most of the features of similar sites around the world. Features such as stats, charts, widgets, badges and other tools.

An example is South Africa’s Amatomu, which ranks bloggers and provides charts and statistics for their blogs. Amatomu also has the ability to track trends and monitor keywords in the local blogosphere via buzzgraphs. With amatomu, bloggers compare their blogs by monthly reach, traffic, etc with those of their competitors to find out who is leading on the blogosphere. The site also lists the top 500 South African blogs based on unique readers, posts, links, etc

A look at NigerianBloggers.com shows that the blogs aggregator has been around since 2005, (way before Amatomu started in March 2007), and provides feeds from Nigerian blogs in real-time. The site currently aggregates about 400 blogs, written by Nigerians at home and abroad from personal blogs to business blogs (covering entrepreneurship, tech, gadgets, mobile, software, apps, etc).

Some of the popular sites registered on NigerianBloggers.com are Bella Naija, DeoluAkinyemi, Black Looks, NaijaEcash, Ladybrille, Ore’s Notes, Oro and Timbuktu Chronicles.

NigerianBloggers.com seems not to have any monetization model as there are no ads or adsense on the site, so I wonder how the site makes money. From what I can see, NigerianBloggers.com is personally funded and perhaps gets support from donations. This perhaps explains why the site is yet to adopt other interesting features of blog aggregators that are of world’s standard.

I’m personally impressed with the fact that the site was basically not created to make money, but will be interested to see how it can develop a business model and integrate other web 2.0 technologies and applications in the near future.