Is Africa exotic? Is it the culture,wild animals or travel that captivates you? Do you want travel? Would you like to trace the land of your roots?



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

Yet if you begin your search at a library, you will find that the information on Africa is available via computer, possibly the same internet that you have access to 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 ChaCha, Guruji.com, Quaero 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 categorize them for you.

There are problems with either of these strategies: Google's search engine strategy for African sites is strongly influenced by the internet business of SEO (search engine optimization) which attempts take advantage of Google's methods to increase a web site's back-links and so make it look better 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 '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 is going to lose nuances in meaning like, searching for academia and may get you tons of listings about 'learn acupuncture' , or even worse, a rock band with the name 'The giant African Professors". 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 acceptable web site: some types of information rich sites can't even get listed. 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 overturned 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 in . And the categories are limited, with few places to put new concepts. It takes months for a category to be approved: if at all.

A successful response is the wikipedia, where everyone gets a shot at updating the site: and amazingly enough, wikipedia does a very good job of being authoritative,appropriate and, generally useful.

Now, in September 2008, there is a new alternative in web site review directories that uses the power of democracy 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 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 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 approved. 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. The Best will rise: 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: