Getting the Best web sites on Africa.

Are you interested in Africa?

Is Africa full of adventure? Is it the scenery,culture,deserts or adventure that fascinates you? Do you want knowledge? Maybe you can revisit the land of your roots?

But how do you find the best information about Africa. The best solutions involve a voodoo recipe of many things: Look it up in an encyclopedia ;Take a class at the community college ;Ask your friends or neighbors . This is what you had to do yesterday: before the information superhighway.

Yet if you begin your exploration at a library, public or private, you will find that much of the information on Africa is available via computer, very likely the same internet that you have access to at your home.

There are a few kinds of web resources that you will see over and over again: the first kind is a search engine, you know, the old standards like Google,Yahoo Search! or newer ones like Guruji.com, Baidu, Quaero or a directory of existing sites: like DMOZ, which use humans working as librarians to pour over the internet sites, find the ones dealing with Africa and sort them for you.

There are some troubles with either of these strategies: Google's ranking algorithm for African sites is highly impacted by the internet business of SEO (search engine optimization) which attempts to defeat Google's methods to increase a web site's back-links and hence make it seem bigger than it really is. This makes it harder to find the real good sources for information on Africa. SEO is big business for sites that get advertizing revenue on the web, because search engines can make or break a web site. There are ethical and unethical people useing these techniques who have not the slightest interest in Africa. In fact, any search engine using computer algorithms to analyse text will totally miss nuances in meaning like, searching for 'teaching profession' and get you tons of listings about 'learn acupuncture' , or even worse, a rock band with the name 'The yellow African Chargers". How many times will you have to dig down to the seventh page of the web search to find something really useful about Africa? More often than you wish!

A directory organized by humans like DMOZ may not suffer that kind of lanugage problem, but the editors of those directories are volunteers, with limited time and have to obey some odd rules about what constitutes an appropriate web site: some information rich sites can't even get listed. In fact, the decisions about what is good or not is under control of a very few people rules that are just too rigid: a junior editor often has a decision overrulled by a higher ranking editor sometimes, for the most obscure reasons. They are well meaning, but can they really speak to be knowledgeable about all they do? The websites that are accepted may have to wait for weeks to get accepted . And the categories are limited, with no place to put new concepts. It may take months for a category to be approved.

A surprisingly successful response is the wikipedia, where everyone gets a shot at updating the site: and amazingly enough, wikipedia does a very good job of being appropriate, informative and, generally useful.

As of September 2008, there is a new challenger in web site review directories that really does attempt to answer the question of which site is best, or at least as they put it: "which site has the most vava-voom!" That new site is http://vava.vu/?Tag=Africa , a web domain out of the Pacific Island nation of Vanuatu. Vava.vu will let any web site be entered to be rated by the general public and given the tag Africa. The operation is simple: a web site about Africa has a rank and a 'statistical strength' associated with it: When someone visits vava.vu, those sites with weaker strength are put side by side, and it is up to the public to choose which site of the two is better. When enough votes are cast, the visitor will see the real top ten sites about Africa : These sites are the ones that you, the public has judged. The idea is honest in that a visitor only can compare two sites at a time: one will win and one will not. A visitor can't give a yea or nay to one site by itself because that would skew the results. The Best will rise: some sites will consistantly win out over other sites.

So if you are interested in Africa , you can go find the answers in several areas: Locally in the library, from friends, or on the internet at your favorite search engine, a directory like DMOZ or wikipedia. Or with the new alternative on the block: http://vava.vu/?Tag=africa

Article Source: http://www.ezx-articles.com

J. Chord is a student of the Web seemingly forever. Knowledgeable about technology he now follows the difficulties people have in locating the information about Africa that is so near, yet so far.

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