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IV Google Directory http://directory.google.com is a searchable subject index that supplements the Google Web index, although it holds a much smaller number of links and currently contains approximately 1.5 million URLs. It is principally designed as a search tool for more general rather than academic topics. Google Directory is based on the Open Directory Project (ODP) http://dmoz.org/, also known as DMOZ, an acronym for Directory Mozilla, which reflects its loose association with Netscape's Mozilla project, an Open Source browser initiative. The ODP was developed in the spirit of Open Source, where development and maintenance are done by Net-citizens, and results are made freely available for all. It attempts to provide the most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web, constructed and maintained by a vast global community of volunteer editors, currently about 20,000. Anyone can submit details of a Web site to be included in the Open Directory. Details are then verified and approved by the volunteer editors, who also have the task of eliminating any hype in the descriptions of Web sites submitted. While Google states that the content of the Google Directory is based on the Open Directory, it adds “and is enhanced using Google’s own technology”. This might explain the quite considerable discrepancies in the number of links shown for the numerous main and sub-categories. For example, on 5 April 2004, Open Directory Project – Regional: Africa, http://dmoz.org/Regional/Africa, showed a total of 13,453 links, whereas Google Directory http://directory.google.com/Top/Regional/Africa/ showed 17,980, with correspondingly larger numbers for individual country sections.The “Regional/Africa” menu seems to be the main access point for searches relating to Africa or African studies and it continues to grow rapidly. It can be accessed by country or by 15 broad categories (Arts and Entertainment, Education, Guides and Directories, Health, Maps and Views, News and Media, Society and Culture, etc.), and thereafter by various sub-categories. There is also a separate sub-category Science >Social Sciences >Area Studies >African Studies, albeit with a mere 99 listings at this time. The number of listings/links are indicated for each country, some are quite sizeable, for example 618 for Namibia, 892 for Zimbabwe, 1,237 for Egypt, and 5,779 for South Africa; at present there are generally a larger number of links for English-speaking Africa. Clicking on a country menu leads to a sub-menu of a dozen or more sub-categories, some further sub-divided. For example, in the Open Directory, News and Media is further sub-divided into Magazines, Newspapers, Online news, Radio and Television, and, in Google Directory, into Radio, Television and, somewhat obscurely, Weather. The Web pages are shown in Google’s PageRank™ order, and Google says this approach to ranking Web sites “enables the highest quality pages to appear first as top results for any Google category”. However, they can also be viewed in alphabetical order. The Google search engine lets you search within a category once you have chosen a specific sub-section of the Directory. Short descriptions accompany all links, and each page shows the category or sub-category in which the links appear, together with cross-references linking to related categories. The largest sub-categories on each page are listed in bold face. Some sub-categories under countries, e.g. Society and Culture, are rather too broad for the serious researcher, and many inevitably contain an unwieldy assortment of all kinds of Web sites. Nonetheless, if you have the time to browse, it is quite possible to track down Web sites here that might not be included in some of the major African studies portals. This applies particularly for country-specific Web sites (rather than those by topic), although country-specific Web sites can also be accessed very quickly through some of the major African studies portals mentioned earlier, which for the most part are accompanied by more extensive and more informed descriptions. One of the Google Directory’s main flaws – perhaps not surprisingly, as these are manually edited lists, based on submissions – is its unevenness from category (or sub-category) to category, or from country to country, and there is also very considerable disparity in currency. For example, Regional >Africa >Society and Culture offers a mixed menu of countries and topics, which includes 1 link for Animal Welfare, 1 for Farming Systems, 14 for Conflicts, 4 for Conservations, 26 on Human Rights and Liberties, or 51 on Literature, but as many as 345 for Cuisines. Another topic is Issues, showing a total of 96 links, which leads to a list of 7 general links, plus a choice of 7 topics and one regional sub-category (Southern Africa) – for example, 33 on Aid and Development, 14 on Conflicts and Conflict Resolution, 5 on Gay and Lesbian Issues, or 5 on Poverty, etc. Clicking on Aid and Development opens up a page with an odd mixture of general sites on development, plus 6 on Burundi, 60 on Economic Development, 10 on ICT and Development, and 5 for Organizations. The last click – and by now you will have clicked six times! – leads to a listing of links for 4 relatively minor organizations apart from Kabissa (which really provides support only in the field of ICT in Africa, and is not a mainstream development organization). Overall, then, if you were looking for African development organizations, the results are very poor. The offerings for African studies – in sub-category
Science >Social sciences >Area Studies >African Studies – are not very
impressive either. It opens with a page of general links, on which NISC South
Africa (the commercial database vendor) comes out top, with a description that
says “Provides local and global information for Africa”, followed by the rather
more relevant US State Department of African Affairs, the African Studies
Association of Australasia and the Pacific, the excellent Africa Research
Central clearinghouse, and a handful of other links. A sub-category menu offers
links to the same Aid and Development and Conflict categories mentioned above,
plus 225 for Government, 112 for History, 68 for Maps and Views, 67 for
Programs and Research Centers, 339 for Society and Culture, plus a very odd
collection of links for “Publications”, at http://directory.google.com/Top/Science/Social_Sciences/Area_Studies/ Google Directory can also be frustrating to
use for more general lines of enquiry – for example, in browsing for libraries
in Africa. Reference >Libraries >By Region brings up a single link, for
St. Helena – and that turns out to be not a link to libraries in St. Helena but
a bibliography on St. Helena. Why coverage of African libraries is so dismal is
difficult to comprehend (unless listings are so badly signposted that it is
difficult to find them), as there is generally good coverage of colleges and
universities in Africa, and other institutions of higher education, which can
be accessed under Reference >Education >Colleges and Universities
>Africa http://directory.google.com/Top/Reference/Education/Colleges_and_ The sub-categories for Arts >Literature >World Literature >African are hardly inspiring: there are only 7 sub-sections, with one entry each for Sierra Leonean and Maghreb, 2 for Ugandan, 10 for Egyptian, 7 for Nigerian, 25 for South African, and 17 for Zimbabwean (plus one related category Arts >Literature >Poetry >In Translation >African, with 11 entries.) The category for “Nigerian” opens with one link each on Ken Saro-Wiwa, Wole Soyinka, Buchi Emecheta and Femi Osofisan, although there is also a further sub-section for Soyinka giving an additional 6 links, plus 13 on Achebe and 2 on Tutuola. The sub-category for “South African” does not fare much better, with sub-sections on just three writers (J.M. Coetzee has 8 links, Nadine Gordimer 11, and Alan Paton 3), plus another 8 links on South African literature or individual writers. In contrast, a Google Web Search for “chinua achebe” or “wole soyinka”, for example, generates 46,400 and 33,800 results, respectively, although those could clearly be quite unmanageable unless the search queries are narrowed down to more specific aspects of these writers. In view of this, using Google Directory as a starting point for searches might well be considered to be a better strategy: in theory, yes, but in practice, no, as the offerings about African writers on Google Directory are so poor that you will do much better using some of the main African studies portals and mega sites as a launch pad for research. Google Directory is not, at this time at least, a good point of departure even for just general browsing for resources on African writers, and whoever the volunteer editors may be for African literature (if, indeed, there are any) they would not appear to be doing a very good job. In conclusion, the overall verdict must be that Google Directory is not a very useful tool for the African studies scholar, although it is probably more useful for the sections on arts and entertainment, news and media, or for other more general information about Africa. While there are also other good sources for tracking down African online newspapers, going to http://directory.google.com/Top/Regional/Africa/News_and_Media/, and then selecting your country of choice, can be quite a good starting point. For example, for South Africa it lists almost 40 online newspapers and other news and media sources. Or to find out quickly what’s happening on the music scene in a particular African country, select the country, e.g. Regional >Africa >Zimbabwe >Arts and Entertainment >Music, which leads to 14 links of resources on Zimbabwean music.
It might be appropriate to use Google Directory if you are not sure how to narrow your search from a broad to a more specialist category, although it has to be added that the Google Directory hierarchy of subject categories, and the various sub-categories, is not very satisfactory, certainly not for African studies research. In their help pages, http://www.google.com/dirhelp.html, Google states “you might prefer to use the directory when you only want to see sites that have been evaluated by an editor”. However, a one or two line (max. 25 words) description – submitted by those who want to be included in the Open Directory – which is then “evaluated”, edited and approved by volunteer editors, hardly amounts to a critical appraisal, especially by non-specialists in the field.
Finally, Google’s claim that, by ordering the Google Directory according to Google’s PageRank™ technology “means that the most relevant and highly-regarded sites on any topic are listed first” is totally unsupported. As has been pointed out earlier, they might well be the most frequently visited sites, but that doesn’t translate into either the most relevant or most highly regarded. Google News http://news.google.com/ was launched in September 2003 and currently (July 2004) is still in its Beta version. It is also available in a text version only at http://news.google.com/news/en/us/mainlite.html, which could be useful for those with slow Internet connections. Google News offers information culled from approximately 4,500 international news sources worldwide “automatically arranged to present the most relevant news first”. For this it uses an automated grouping technology process developed by Google that pulls together related headlines and photos from thousands of news sources worldwide, and based on how often, on what sites, and how prominently a story appears on the Web. Thus, the first most important point to understand is that, unlike other news services, there is no human intervention or editorial judgment here, and the headlines and news stories that appear on Google News are selected entirely by computer algorithms, which Google is still in the process of fine-tuning at this time. Below each headline is the source of the article linking to its full-text version, a snippet of its text, and an indication of how long ago it was published. For each story, Google typically shows about half a dozen major news media, together with a list of other news sources carrying the same story, sometimes several hundred. Click on to this link and it will lead you to all the sources. News stories are updated continuously, and the Google News page refreshes itself every 15 minutes. A “sort by date” function will arrange stories in chronological order, with the most recent report placed first. Google News and its archive include articles and news items that have appeared within the past 30 days. There is a search facility – including an Advanced Search menu – to track down particular news stories, or people in the news, etc., which covers not only US/World politics and current affairs but also Business, Sci/Tech, Sports, Health and Entertainment. Google News is offered in several versions, each tailored to a different national audience. At this time (July 2004) international versions of Google News are available for Australia, Canada, France, Germany, India, Italy, New Zealand, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States. You can find links to them at the foot of the Google News page. Google hopes to add further countries over time. The Google News search facility supports most of the basic Google advanced search operators mentioned in the preceding pages (see Advanced Search & Google search operators), and search queries should be constructed in much the same way as for a regular Google Web Search. However, please note that insofar as Google news searches article text and titles, it will not find the names of the journalists, reporters or authors of the articles unless their names also appear within the text. The Google Advanced News Search page http://news.google.com/advanced_news_search?hl=en&edition=us has a similar interface as that of the main Google Web Search page where you can further fine tune your search by limiting it to articles from a particular news source, or confining it to articles from news sources located in particular countries. Additionally, you have the choice of selecting whether results or Google News Alerts (see below) returned should be for terms occurring anywhere in an article, only in the headline text, or as part of its URL. You can also further restrict it to return only articles published in the last hour, date, week or month, or published between certain dates within the last 30-day period. As with Google Web Search, when searching Google News it is prudent to include search terms that are as specific as possible, as otherwise you are likely to be inundated with hundreds or thousands of irrelevant results. And for the best results, craft your search queries through the Advanced News Search interface mentioned above. Perhaps one of Google News’s most attractive features is its clustering capability. Unlike most other news search engines, all the information about a story is brought together in one place rather than shown separately, thus leaving it to you which sources you wish to pursue – for example, whether you wish to learn more about a breaking news story from a liberal newspaper such as the UK Guardian, or the right wing Fox News in the US, or in an African news source. Indeed, it can be interesting to compare how different news media report the same story, e.g. US media vs. African media, and what makes headlines and what doesn’t. Part of Google News, the free Google News Alerts http://www.google.com/newsalerts?hl=en is another useful feature. You create a news alert by entering details of a news story, topic or name, event, etc., that you wish to monitor, provide your e-mail address, and then hit the “Create News Alert” button. Google will confirm this in an e-mail to you, which contains a link back to Google. In order to activate the news alert and verify your request you must click on the link or, alternatively, copy and paste the URL into your browser. You can stop the news alert at any time by clicking on a link at the foot of every e-mail news alert that then unsubscribe you. You can have as many news alerts as you wish, but you must verify them after every 10 alerts requested before adding others. You can elect to receive alerts once a day or “as it happens”. You can apply the same techniques as for Google’s advanced search operators (see Advanced Search & Google search operators) to create your news alert. Click on to the Google News Advanced Search page and enter your search terms with whatever restrictions/search operators you wish to apply. Then click the Google Search button and, when the results page appears, copy the text in the search box on that page and paste it into the box labelled “News Search” field to create your alert. Example: thabo mbeki aids a search for press comments about President
Thabo Mbeki’s views and statements about the thorny subject of AIDS in South
Africa, and treatment for those infected with HIV/AIDS, but The search box shows Google News is also handy for checking out utterances made by people, personalities or celebrities in the news. You can of course use Google Web Search for this, but Google News is likely to pick it up quicker, though will only archive it for 30 days. For example, who said, “I would love to go to the east coast of Africa. Is that the Ivory Coast?”? Using Google Web Search, with the words enclosed in quotation marks as shown above (although Google will search only for the first ten words in this phrase), the answer is tennis star Serena Williams, and Google finds the story as reported in the Guardian (Wednesday, 23 June 2004) and archived at http://sport.guardian.co.uk/wimbledon2004/story/0,14530,1245162,00.html. The comment, demonstrating a disarming lack of knowledge about Africa, was made during an interview at Wimbledon 2004 when she was questioned about her travel plans for going to Africa. In Google News the same search, or a search for just serena williams africa will pick up the full interview at the official Wimbledon Web site at http://www.wimbledon.org/en_GB/news/interviews/2004-06-22/200406221087916990961.html, with links to some other news media who reported extracts from the same interview. While Google is not the only one to provide a free news alerts service, it seems to work well for keeping track of breaking news stories, personalities, politicians, events and places, or, for example, African artists and writers in the news – always provided, of course, that they are actually covered in the news media picked up by Google. This is probably not the case for news items appearing in several (relatively low-circulation) African newspapers, or in some other African news media. Google News vs. other news sources for Africa It is interesting to compare Google News and its coverage on Africa with two other leading providers of African news and information worldwide. One of them is the Washington DC-based allAfrica.com http://allafrica.com (entry 652 in the African Studies Companion) from AllAfrica Global Media, which posts more than 700 news stories daily from over 100 African media organizations and from allAfrica reporters. The home page provides access to the top news headlines of the day ranked for news value by the allAfrica editorial team, together with links to unranked stories posted as they become available. It is arguably the best pan-African news source currently available. The other is the BBC World Service – Africa (entry 28 in the African Studies Companion) http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/default.stm – an enormously rich resource not only for news in print format, but for the latest audio news bulletins on Africa (in English, French, Portuguese, Somali, Hausa and Kiswahili), as well as audio files from the BBC’s three major news programmes on Africa: Network Africa, Focus on Africa, and Africa Live. For example, on a relatively uneventful day, picked at random, on Monday 29 March 2004, when accessed at 14.30hrs GMT, Google News listed details of 28 top stories, of which one (the only one on Africa) was a news item in the New York Times (“and 213 related”), which reported heavy gunfire breaking out early Sunday in Kinshasa, as unidentified gunmen carried out simultaneous attacks against several military posts and two radio and television stations. On the same day and time, allAfrica.com also featured this news item from the Democratic Republic of the Congo as one of its top headlines, along with two dozen other African news stories covering events in the Côte d’Ivoire, Libya, Kenya, Liberia, Malawi, Sudan, and other countries. AllAfrica.com picked up the story from the BBC News World service. However, the BBC was already reporting it as a coup attempt against president Joseph Kabila, and announced the arrest of 15 people involved in it. Additionally, the BBC, on the same day, offered access to 12 other African news items that it considered top stories. Other tests, carried out on different days during April and May 2004, presented a similar picture in terms of reporting African news stories. So clearly allAfrica.com and the BBC World Service are well ahead both in terms of currency and in their coverage, but this might be different for major breaking news stories as they relate to Africa. Together with Google News, the BBC and all.Africa.com can provide remarkably comprehensive and fairly balanced news coverage of African affairs. If you want to quickly access pictures and images on Africa, on any conceivable topic, Google http://images.google.com/ is the place to start. Google's Image Search is the most comprehensive on the Web, with a staggering 880 million images indexed and available for viewing, and it is streets ahead of any of its competitors, such as Picsearch http://www.picsearch.com. Images include all kinds of illustrative material, pictures and photographs, drawings, cartoons, icons, graphics, clip art, maps, posters, as well as pictures of book and record/CD covers. Google Image Search is a marvellous resource. Each search result brings up a series of thumbnail images together with the URL details where the picture is to be found, the file type, the image dimensions, and the file size. Clicking on to the thumbnail will lead to the image viewer interface in a frame. The top part shows the images in a slightly larger but still scaled down version; click on “See full-size image” and the bottom frame will display the image in its original context. This is usually too large to be viewed without scrolling on monitors with a screen area set to 800 x 600 pixels, but you can load the page in a full browser window by clicking on “Remove Frame” in the top right-hand corner of the page. Additionally (if you are using Windows) hit the F11 key on your keyboard to make maximum use of your screen. Or you can, of course, increase your screen area settings. You can save any picture to your hard disk as you would save other graphics or images files, and in Windows you can also save it as Wallpaper for your computer desktop. In order to show you the most relevant results, Google omits some entries very similar to the first five or six pages it displays when showing the initial search results. It also uses its sophisticated algorithms to ensure that what it considers to be the highest quality images are presented first in the results, and on the whole this works quite well. When you use Google Image Search, narrow down your query as much as possible, and limit it to just a few words. It is also important to understand that Google Image Search searches the text relating to images rather than the images themselves. (The Google search robots cannot read image files, but they can index the special tags known as ALT tags that Web designers usually add to the HTML code around an image, describing the contents of the image.) For this reason, search results might not always be as precise as those for searches conducted in Google Web Search, and occasionally might show images that Google thinks are related to the image search query, but which may not in fact be relevant. Google Image Search also has sophisticated Advanced Search facilities http://www.google.com/advanced_image_search?hl=en, where you can refine your search terms using search operators (see Advanced Search & Google search operators) and/or the Additional commands and special syntaxes described in earlier sections of this guide. For example, you can use the site:[followed by domain] command to restrict your search to images on a particular Web site or database, such as that of a museum of African art or African anthropology. Additional refinements on the Google Advanced Image Search let you specify the size of the image (in its dimension/pixels; with “any” as default, or small, medium or large), the file type (any, JPG, GIF or PNG), and the colouration (any colours, black and white, grayscale, or full colour). On this page you can also set different filtering options (none, moderate, or strict) to filter out anything that might be considered offensive, such as pornographic images. As with Google Web Search, Google Image Search is not case sensitive, and words can be typed in either lower or upper case. What can be found on Google Image Search Searching Google Images is excellent for finding any kind of maps of African countries, either regions or cities, or to find and view works of African art in all their forms. Find photographs of cultural objects from African collections at museums and other repositories, including everyday household tools, clothing and footwear, baskets, gourds, cooking utensils, bracelets, necklaces, musical instruments, and much more. It is equally good for finding photographs of people, such as African writers, artists or musicians. Or for finding photographs – and sometimes rare archival pictures – of African rulers, statesmen or -women, African visionaries, men and women involved in liberation struggles, civil rights leaders, and scholars, both from the past or relating to contemporary Africa. By way of a few examples of this treasure chest, it finds almost 73,000 images relating to ghana (although such a general search term would clearly not be manageable and would require refinement); over 4,500 for timbuktu, and over 1,100 for freetown “sierra leone”. And it can find images and photographs of current or past African leaders, for which it is usually prudent to enclose the names in double quotation marks (see Using quotation marks); for example, “kwame nkrumah” brings up 265 images (mostly photographs), and “jerry rawlings”, 132. It can be searched for items of African art: e.g. “luba stool” finds 149 images, “gelede mask”, 147; or for photographs of African writers, artists or musicians: for example, almost 500 are found of “wole soyinka”, 65 of “ngugi wa thiong’o”, 106 of “sembene ousmane”, 66 of “mariama bâ”, and over 700 if you key in the name of African musician “salif keita”. For African artists it will generate results both of photographs of the artists as well as of pictures of their work – for example, 6 and 18, respectively, for the Nigerian graphic artists, painters and sculptors “adebisi fabunmi” and “bruce onobrakpeya”. You will probably get more results, but also some that will be irrelevant, if you enter search terms without quotation marks, but that is not necessarily a bad strategy to start off with. For example, it will show 241 results for the Nigerian artist twins seven seven (without the quotation marks); however, in this case, in view of the unusual name – and because Google’s Boolean AND default means it will search and display results for pages matching all the search terms – it also generates some completely irrelevant results that include the word “seven” and/or “twins” in their captions or descriptions – including a picture of the smiling “Carr Twins at Seven” of Carrville Iowa in their seventh month! While these are relatively minor distractions, you can avoid them by entering the search terms “twins seven seven” in double quotation marks, which will then display just 32 images, all but one of which is relevant. So the thing to remember is that if you key in more than one term it will search for images related to both or all the terms, but if you put the search terms (or part of the search terms) in double quotation marks it will find images matching only the exact phrase and in the given order. You can also use the OR operator(see Using the OR operator), or the “-” exclusion search operator (see Using the “-“ sign). However, if you are refining search terms for more complex queries it is probably a good idea to compose the search query on the Google Advanced Image Search form. The site:[followed by domain] command is particularly useful for searching for images at special locations or specific Web sites. For example, if you are searching for photographs of Senufo art, a Google Image Search for senufo will display 1,190 results. Restrict it to those on a particular site, in this case to the Italian Africaarte site at http://www.africarte.it/ site:www.africarte.it senufo it will generate results for images that can be found on this particular Web site. A search for dogon will show as many as 9,220 images for Dogon art, but restricting
it to a domain, in this case a sub-page of the Vrije Universiteit Brussels
Library at http://www.vub.ac.be/BIBLIO/nieuwenhuysen/african-art/african- site:www.vub.ac.be dogon will present just a dozen or so results. And site:www.unc.edu dogon will come up with results of pages at the Anthropology Department at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. You can use the site:[followed by domain] command to locate African art and artefacts at museums of African art – for example, in the collections at National Museum of African Art at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. Examples: site:www.nmafa.si.edu
asante Bear in mind, though, that the results generated, and the photographs that you will be able to see (with accompanying text) are not indicative of a museum’s holdings for any particular group of African art, merely what is publicly accessible as photographs published on Web sites, or as part of visual databases. Copyright and clearing permissions for using images If you want to use any of the pictures in an academic paper or elsewhere, on a Web site or in a photo gallery, you must obtain appropriate written permission from the owners or copyright-holders of the material. However, in the case of some images appearing on non-commercial sites you may be permitted to reproduce material without written permission provided due acknowledgement is made to the original source. Some images may also be reproduced without written permission under the convention of “fair use” or “fair dealing for purposes of criticism and review” applicable under British and US copyright law (as it applies to copyright in print media), again always provided that due acknowledgement is made, that the use of the material is not for commercial purposes, and that only one or two images are reproduced. However, this is actually something of a grey area, and if in doubt whether or not permission is required, it is usually sensible to seek written permission from the copyright-holder. If you are not already familiar with the basics of Usenet, first check out the Google Groups help pages at http://www.google.com/googlegroups/help.html. These help pages also offer useful tips about posting on groups, including a posting style guide, posting FAQs, as well as a Usenet Glossary. The fine distinctions between Internet “groups”, “mailing lists”, “discussion forums” and “discussion lists” can sometimes get a little bit blurred. One the one hand, there are Usenet newsgroups (just called “newsgroups”), and there are online discussion forums or mailing lists on the other, although both are commonly referred to as “discussion groups”. Usenet Groups are either “Open” (anyone can join), “Restricted” (i.e. the group administrator approves all requests for membership), or “Closed” (only invited members can join). While mailing lists are similar in nature, on many (though by no means all) academic lists you not only first have to be formally approved as a “subscriber” but most postings to the lists are moderated, i.e. approved by an editor before they are released to the list. Postings are sent by e-mail to subscribers only. They are also referred to as electronic mailing lists, or Listserver lists. List servers are the automated mailing list services that facilitate such online group discussions – which can be academic, professional, or otherwise. In the African studies field a number are listed in Section 20 of the African Studies Companion (entries 1,800 – 1,832), although this is only a selective list. Users subscribe to a list on a specific topic of interest. Messages sent to the list are redistributed simultaneously from the list server to all the other subscribers to that list. Subscribers can read the messages and respond to them if they wish, or post their own queries or announcements, but it is not possible to post a message or participate in discussions unless you are a subscriber to the list. Most mailing lists maintain searchable archives of all postings going back several years; see, for example, all the H-Net Africa mailing lists logs that can be searched at http://www.h-net.msu.edu/~africa/. Google Groups does not index academic mailing list archives at present, but is reportedly testing a new version of its Groups service that will include them. Somewhat confusingly, Google Groups can be accessed at two sites at present (July 2004), the original Google Groups at http://www.google.com/grphp, which has a link to the preview version of the new Google Groups2 Beta http://groups-beta.google.com/, launched in May 2004. Google Groups contains the entire archive of Usenet discussion groups dating back to 1981, and includes the former Deja.com archive. You can browse the complete list of groups or search to find postings on Usenet discussion forums from a database containing more than 845 million postings. The archive is updated several times a day. To find a particular group, type the name of the group into the search box. Alternatively browse the groups starting with the Google Groups home page, which is arranged under Usenet hierarchy top-level categories, e.g. alt., humanities., rec., sci., soc., etc. In Google Groups2 Beta there is now also a top-level menu of broad subject categories (with various sub-topics) to facilitate browsing, and you click on a category that matches your interests. The most recent postings appear on top of the list with the date of posting, grouped by thread subject and indicating the number of articles in the thread, as well as showing the name of the most recent poster. For each group, Google displays a shaded bar: the more shading, the more active the list and the more frequently messages are posted. As you click on a group, and a particular thread, it will open up in a pane on the left showing all or the most recent postings for the thread, with the most recent ones on top. A system of indentation and coloured dashed lines tells you who replied to whom in the thread. Advanced Search facilities enable searches by newsgroup, author of the posting, language, subject/newsgroup topic, message ID, or restricted by date. And, as with Google Web Search, you can use advanced search operators, or special syntaxes, (see Advanced Search & Google search operators and Additional commands and special syntaxes) to fine tune your search, e.g. to find messages containing all the words, with the exact phrase only, with at least one of the words, or without specific words. If you search for authors of postings, you will need to be mindful of the fact that they may not have used their real names or valid e-mail address, instead using a pseudonym to prevent spammers from getting hold of their e-mail addresses. As you formulate a search, you might wish to include words or phrases that may already have been part of a question someone has posted earlier. You can remove messages you have posted yourself – or “nuke” your posts, in Usenet jargon – by using an automatic removal tool. However, this requires registration and Google will do it only on condition that you provide an e-mail address that can be verified, and you must sign (by electronic signature) a sworn statement confirming that you are the person who posted the message(s). In the new Google Groups2 Betayou can now also create your own group, designate it as either public or restricted, and then have it made available on Google Groups. In order to do this you must first establish a Google account and have your e-mail address verified. In Google Groups2 Beta all the replies to an initial post are now gathered on one page, and you can bookmark topics you are interested in, and have new replies to that topic delivered to your inbox. If you are trying to track down postings on a specific Usenet group, and if you know its name, then searching is straightforward. However, browsing is a rather different matter, and finding newsgroups on Africa is not easy. Neither the top-level areas of the hierarchy, nor the sub-groups or tributaries, usually give you much clue as to the nature of the discussions on these groups. If you key in the topic africa or african in the search box, or the name of an African country, it will lead you to postings in, e.g. soc.culture.algeria, soc.culture.ethiopia, soc.culture-sierra-leone, soc.culture-south africa, soc.culture.zimbabwe, soc.history.african.biafra, and the larger and more general soc.culture.african. Search terms such as africa travel will lead you to e.g. rec.travel.africa. And certain topics in the secondary-level category could lead to Usenet groups which include discussions that are Africa-related, e.g. alt.circumcision. The option (in the original Google Groups) to “Browse complete list of groups” is not very helpful either; 50 groups are presented at a time, although you can select from an alphabetical A-Z pull-down menu to speed up your browsing. For browsing purposes, the soc.culture sub-topics might be the best approach, as most African countries seem to have at least one soc.culture Usenet group. Google Groups vs. Yahoo! Groups At this time – and for me at least – Google Groups compares rather unfavourably with Yahoo! Groups http://groups.yahoo.com/, primarily because Yahoo! has a more user-friendly interface for the purpose of browsing, based on a top-level menu of broad subject categories, with many more fairly specific sub- and sub-sub-categories, as well as country categories. The test version of the new Google Groups2 Beta now has an enhanced user interface and an improved opening menu for browsing purposes, with broad subject categories and sub-topics, but it is still nowhere near as good as Yahoo!’s – for example, in Google Groups you can search by the name of an African country, but you cannot browse by countries. The best approach to find relevant groups in Yahoo! Groups is to use the regional group listings. For example http://dir.groups.yahoo.com/dir/Regional/Regions/Africa has (July 2004) 212 group listings for this general “Africa” heading, plus a sub-menu that invites you to browse for more specialized groups, including countries and regions. Group listings are sorted in descending order by number of members, with the largest groups on top. For each group it shows the number of members, a link to the archives (and an indication as to whether they are publicly accessible or whether access is restricted to members), together with a short description of the group. Clicking on “More” will lead you to the home page of the group with more detailed information, settings, group e-mail addresses, and providing access to the most recent messages by year and by month. Most pages also come up with sponsored advertising links, but this is not serious distraction. If you
want to browse by country http://dir.groups.yahoo.com/dir/Regional/Regions/Africa/Countries_ You can
also track down groups through other sub-categories; for example, http://dir.groups.yahoo.com/dir/Recreation___Sports/Travel/By_ For
groups on African politics or current affairs, select http://dir.groups.yahoo.com/dir/Government___Politics/By_Country_ Alternatively,
use a country approach; for example, for Ghana, http://dir.groups.yahoo.com/dir/Government___Politics/By_Country_or_
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