Getting Excellent information on Africa.

Are you fascinated in Africa?

Is Africa exotic? Is it the deserts,South Africa or adventure that captivates you? Do you want knowledge? Would you like to investigate the land of your roots?

But how do you find the best information on Africa. The best solutions involve a voodoo recipe of a few things: Look it up in an encyclopedia ;Ask an African,if you know one;Take a class at a university. This is what you had to do in the 'olden' days: before the web .

Yet when you begin your search at a library, you will find that much of the information on Africa is available via computer, possibly the same internet that you have access to at your home.

There are several kinds of web resources that you will see over and over again: the first kind is a search engine, Your friends, the old standards like Yahoo Search! , Google or newer ones like Guruji.com, ChaCha 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 identify them for you.

There are problems with both of these approaches: Google's search engine algorithm for African sites is strongly impacted by the web business of SEO (search engine optimization) which attempts to defeat Google's hueristics to increase a web site's visibility and hence make it seem better 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 good and bad people useing these techniques who have not the slightest interest in Africa. In fact, any search engine using computer algorithms to analyse text is going to completely miss nuances in meaning like, searching for 'teaching profession' and may get you tons of listings about getting training , or even worse, a rock band with the name 'The cloudy African Chargers". How many times will you have to dig down to the third page of the web search to find something really useful about Africa? More often than you wish!

A directory organized by humans like DMOZ will 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 types of information rich sites can't even get in. In fact, the decisions about what is good or not is under in the hands of a very few people rules that are just too rigid: a junior editor often has a decision overturned 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 months to get accepted , if ever. And the categories are limited, with few places to put new concepts. It takes months for a category to be approved.

A surprisingly successful response has been the wikipedia, where everyone can update the information: and amazingly enough, wikipedia does a very good job of being authoritative,appropriate, precise and, well, generally useful.

Now, in September 2008, there is a new alternative in web site review directories that uses the power of the public 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 venture 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 grading is simple: a web site on 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 visitor to say which site of the two is more appropriate. When enough votes are cast, the visitor will see the real top ten sites about Africa ,or any category: These sites are the ones that you, the public has judged. The idea is fair 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. Some sites will consistantly prevail 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://worldofcompendium.com

J. Chord is a student of the WWW since before it started. Knowledgeable about the www he now follows the difficulties people have in finding the information about Africa that is so near, yet so far.

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