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What is it that makes people interested in Africa? Is Africa full of adventure? Is it the South Africa,scenery,people or adventure that draws you? Do you desire knowledge? Would you like to investigate your ancestors? But how do you find the best information on Africa. The best solutions involve a voodoo recipe of several things: Go to the library;Take a class at a university;Ask your friends or neighbors . This is what you had to do in the 'olden' days: before the information superhighway. Yet if you begin your exploration at a library, you will find that the information on Africa is available on a computer, very likely the same internet that you have access to at your home. There are two 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, 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 categorize them for you. There are shortcomings with either of these tactics: Google's ranking algorithm for African sites is highly influenced by the web business of SEO (search engine optimization) which attempts to defeat Google's hueristics to increase a web site's ranking and so make it look 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 can ignore ambiguities in language for example, searching for academia and may get you tons of listings about 'going back to school' , or even worse, a rock band with the name 'The yellow African Membership". 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 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 acceptable web site: many types of information rich sites can't even get in. In fact, the decisions about what is good or not is under control of a very few people with over rigid rules: 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 months to get approved . And the categories are limited, with no place to put new concepts. It takes months for a category to be approved: if at all. A surprisingly successful response has been the wikipedia, where everyone gets a shot at updating the information: and surprisingly, wikipedia does a very good job of being precise, informative, accurate and, generally useful. Now, in September 2008, there is a new start-up in web site rating 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 judging 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 public to vote 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 given the green lite to. 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 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 is fascinated by the WWW seemingly forever. An old timer in 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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