articleaddict.com has a wide variety of articles for you to read.
Search:

Home | Travel & Vacation | International


Finding Authoritative information on Africa.

By: J. Chord

What is it that makes people fascinated in Africa?

Is Africa full of adventure? Is it the wild animals,culture,deserts or adventure that fascinates you? Do you want knowledge? Maybe you can investigate the land of your ancestors?

But how do you find the best information about Africa. The best solutions involve a mix of many things: Take a class at a university;Ask an African. This is what you had to do in the 'olden' days: before the information superhighway.

Yet if you start your exploration at a library, public or private, you will find that much of the information on Africa is available on a computer, possibly 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 Google, Ask.com or newer ones like Quaero, Baidu 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 some shortcomings with either of these recipes: Google's ranking algorithm for African sites is strongly influenced by the web business of SEO (search engine optimization) which attempts to defeat Google's hueristics to increase a web site's visibility 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 internet, because search engines can make or break a web site. There are 'black hat' and 'white hat' 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 meaning like, searching for 'teaching profession' and get you tons of listings about 'going back to school' , or even worse, a rock band with the name 'The yellow African Power Cords". How many times haveyou had to dig down to the fifth 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 have 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 up an acceptable web site: many 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 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 in . And the categories are limited, with no place to put new concepts. It takes months for a category to be approved.

A surprisingly successful alternative is the wikipedia, where everyone can update the information: and surprisingly, wikipedia has a very good track record of being precise, informative, accurate and, generally useful.

As of September 2008, there is a new challenger 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 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 say which of the two is better. 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 given the green lite to. 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. 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://articleaddict.com

J. Chord has followed the internet seemingly forever. Knowledgeable about networking of computers he now follows the difficulties people have in locating the information about Africa that is so near, yet so far.

Please Rate this Article

 

Not yet Rated

Click the XML Icon Above to Receive International Articles Via RSS!
Additional Articles From - Home | Travel & Vacation | International
Sign Up for a free account or learn more.
Submit Articles
Member Login
Top Authors
Most Popular Articles
Submission Guidelines
Article RSS Feeds
New Stuff
About Us
Free Link Directory
Contact Us
Privacy Policy
Terms of Service
Sitemap
rent this Ad space monthly.

Powered by Article Dashboard