Is Africa full of adventure? Is it the deserts,wild animals,South Africa or adventure that draws you? Do you want knowledge? Would you like to revisit your ancestors?



But how do you find the best information on Africa. The best solutions involve a combination of a few things: Ask an African,if you know one;Ask your friends or neighbors ;Look it up in an encyclopedia . This is what you had to do yesterday: before the web .

Even 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 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 Ask.com or newer ones like Guruji.com or a directory of existing sites: like DMOZ, which use humans working as librarians to pour over the web sites, find the ones dealing with Africa and identify them for you.

There are troubles with both of these strategies: Google's search engine strategy for African sites is strongly influenced by the business of SEO (search engine optimization) which attempts to defeat Google's hueristics to increase a web site's back-links and so make it look more important 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 make money 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 lose ambiguities of meaning for example, searching for lectureship and may get you tons of listings about 'learn acupuncture' , or even worse, a rock band with the name 'The blue African Membership". 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 kinds 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 accepted . And the categories are limited, with no place to put new concepts. It may take months for a new category to be approved: if at all.

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

As of September 2008, there is a new alternative in web site ranking 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 , 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 visitor to vote which site of the two is more useful. 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 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: