Is Africa the dark continent? Is it the people,scenery,north African Egypt or travel that captivates you? Do you desire knowledge? Maybe you can investigate the land of your ancestors?



But how do you find the best information on Africa. The best solutions involve a mix of several things: Take a class at the community college ;Ask your friends or neighbors ;Look it up in an encyclopedia . This is what you had to do in the 'olden' days: before the web .

Even when you begin your search 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 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 Yahoo Search! or newer ones like Wikiseek 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 troubles using these approaches: Google's ranking strategy for African sites is highly influenced by the internet business of SEO (search engine optimization) which attempts to defeat Google's hueristics to increase a web site's back-links and hence make it seem 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 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 can totally miss ambiguities in language like, searching for academia and may get you tons of listings about getting training , or even worse, a rock band with the name 'The giant African Power Cords". How many times will you have 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 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 appropriate web site: many 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 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 weeks to get accepted , if ever. And the categories are limited, with no place to put new concepts. It takes months for a new category to be approved: if at all.

A very successful response is the wikipedia, where everyone gets a shot at updating the site: and amazingly enough, wikipedia has a very good track record of being accurate,authoritative, informative and, generally useful.

As of 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 , 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 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 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 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 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: