Is Africa exotic? Is it the people,culture or travel that fascinates you? Do you desire travel? Would you like to investigate your roots?



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

Even when you start your exploration 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 several 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 web sites, find the ones dealing with Africa and sort them for you.

There are troubles using these strategies: Google's ranking strategy for African sites is strongly impacted by the web business of SEO (search engine optimization) which attempts to defeat Google's hueristics to increase a web site's ranking and hence 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 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 is going to completely ignore nuances of meaning like, searching for 'teaching profession' and may 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 third page of the web search to find something really useful about Africa? More times than you wish!

A directory organized by humans like DMOZ may 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 listed. 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 approved . And the categories are limited, with no place to put new concepts. It takes months for a new category to be approved.

A successful alternative has been the wikipedia, where everyone gets a shot at updating the listing: and amazingly enough, wikipedia does a very good job of being informative, accurate and, generally useful.

As of September 2008, there is a new start-up in web site rating 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 choose which site 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 approved. The idea is statistically solid 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 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: