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Are you interested in Africa? Is Africa exotic? Is it the deserts,culture,people or travel that captivates you? Do you want knowledge? Would you like to trace the land of your roots? But how do you find the best information about Africa. The best solutions involve a combination of many things: Ask your friends or neighbors ;Ask an African,if you know one;Go to the library. This is what you had to do in the 'olden' days: before the information superhighway. Even when you begin your exploration at a library, public or private, you will find that much of the information on Africa is available by way of a computer, very likely 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, you know, the old standards like Google,Yahoo Search! or newer ones like Quaero, Guruji.com 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 shortcomings with both of these approaches: Google's ranking algorithm for African sites is strongly impacted by the internet business of SEO (search engine optimization) which attempts to defeat Google's methods to increase a web site's visibility and so 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 internet, 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 can ignore nuances of language for example, searching for academia and get you tons of listings about getting training , or even worse, a rock band with the name 'The blue African Power Cords". How many times haveyou had to dig down to the 21st 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 makes an acceptable web site: many types of information rich sites can't even get listed. 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 overrulled by a another 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 approved . And the categories are limited, with no place to put new concepts. It may take months for a new category to be approved. A very successful alternative has been the wikipedia, where everyone gets a shot at updating the listing: and surprisingly, wikipedia has a very good track record of being authoritative, precise,appropriate and, well, generally useful. Now, in September 2008, there is a new start-up 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 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 evaluation 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 vote which 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 approved. 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 win out over lesser 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.writerdatabase.com
J. Chord has followed the Web since before it started. Knowledgeable about networking of computers he now follows the difficulties people have in using the information about Africa that is so near, yet so far.
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