The new SA Top Sites site, is allegedly growing at a rate of about a new member every hour (I did have trouble opening it this am though). After my membership being solicited via a friendly email I asked Justin Hartman for something to post about his site. His response in full below. Now I’ve always had a thing against popularity for the sake of it, and mindless pursuit of popularity is a significant part of what is wrong with this world, mynsinsiens. But I like Justin’s approach. I think this his site is worth keeping an eye on and for some behind the scenes intrigue see his public apology to 2Large, the ISP of the previous SA Top Sites site.

SA Top Sites (http://www.satopsites.com) officially launched on Sunday 15 January solely out of a selfish need that I had… It’s not quite as sinister as that but I think a little history is required to shed some light on the subject.

About 16 months ago I started a website for Arsenal (www.arsenalsa.co.za) football fans in South Africa. The site grew to astronomical lengths and before I knew it we were generating around 45,000 page impressions each month.

Then one fine day about six months ago I managed to stumble across a website that had a little button with a ranking value on it and the button said “SA Top Sites”. Naturally I clicked on this button and very soon I had my own button to display on the Arsenal website and within no time we had climbed the ladder into the top 5 rankings.

The fascination with competing against other websites for the #1 spot was not only shared by myself. I found that members of the Arsenal club grew to love the Top Sites and it became a daily visit to see what the other websites were doing.

Three weeks ago however, the SA Top Sites website went down. Our buttons stopped working and access to the website itself brought up a 404 error page. This had happened before so I, along with all the other members, thought it was a temporary problem but after two weeks I realised this website was most likely never going to come back online.

All I really wanted was to see the Arsenal website back up on the rankings and it was freaking me out to no end that nothing was happening. In my spare time (like I have any) I own and run a successful web development and hosting company, Hartman Productions (www.hartpro.com), and because of this I decided to take the initiative and start my own SA Top Sites website and alas a new version of SA Top Sites was born.

I really wasn’t expecting much. I emailed a few people I knew who were previously on SA Top Sites and told them about what I was doing and that first day 39 members signed up. The next day a further 11 signed up and the day after that 12 signed up. This hasn’t stopped however and as I write this now an additional 24 new members signed up today bringing the total membership to a staggering 86 websites which I think is not bad for 96 hours.

The feedback from members has been amazing. Popular bloggers like Tertia from So Close (http://tertia.typepad.com/so_close/), Bee from Accidental Mother (http://beeslife.blogdrive.com/) and Wezzo from ChumpStyle (http://chump-style.blogspot.com/) have all emailed me personally to tell me what a fantastic site this has become and how much they love the competition.

In fact it was Tertia who asked me privately “what’s in it for you?” and while there is no financial reward I have to admit it gives me a personal lift to see the effect this new site has had on the community. So much so that tonight I launched a dedicated Forum (http://www.satopsites.com/forum/index.php) for the website where I truly hope to get members alike to share their experiences, strengths and hopes with each other.

The friends made the last few days are unbelievable. It has truly been a fulfilling experience and I aint gonna stop here!

What’s next on the agenda for SA Top Sites? You’ll just have to subscribe to find out :)

There seems to be a minor proliferation of South African, oops, I mean Safrican, search engine type websites going on, interesting in the face of Great Google Almighty and the rush to capitalise on this whole Web 2.0 storm in a teaspoon. Why the hell not!?