"Gold Medal" For The Perspective
By George H. Nubo
Oct 30, 2000

The growth of The Perspective reminds one of an old Liberian story about Ear and Mosquito. As the story goes, Mosquito once asked Ear for a date. But Ear found the request hilarious and felt insulted. She couldn't help, but laughed. She finally told Mosquito that his physical condition showed that he was suffering from some chronic disease and she doubted that Mosquito would be around for long time. She advised Mosquito to seek some treatment, though it could be a waste of time and money.

Poor and disappointed Mosquito left reluctantly. After several months and even years Mosquito is still around. This is the reason why when you come in contact with Mosquito, he first goes to your Ear to remind the Ear that he is still living.

The same can be said about The Perspective newsmagazine. When we launched the paper during the throes of the Liberian chaos (June, 1996), "to approach the Liberian predicament from a provocative [or different] perspective" many individuals dismissed us - saying, "in just a matter of months the paper would go under." Some well known paper even carried excerpts from our stories without attributions because of our size.

As was in the case of Mosquito, it has been over four years and we are still well and strong. We are growing every day. But there were some organizations like Africa News Service, now AllAfrica.com, that did not make the Ear's mistake. Though we were small, Africa News or AllAfrica.com has been carrying our stories for over three years.

Things have changed! We have become the authoritative resource paper on Liberia. We are now linked by several sites. Thousands of People (including Mosquitoes and Ears) from over seventy countries visit our site on the monthly basis.

But unlike Mosquito who regularly reminds the Ear that he is still living, we at The Perspective do not heap on encomiums for ourselves. This is why we have not been pounding our chests during to past few years.

But recently, a group known as Link2Go wasted no time in reminding the world that The Perspective has become the authoritative resource newsmagazine on Liberia by giving the paper the kudos it deserves.

In the Award Letter sent to The Perspective, Link2Go states:

"Each quarter, Links2Go samples millions of web pages to determine which pages are most heavily cited by web pages authors, such as yourself. The most popular pages are downloaded and automatically categorized by topic For topics like Music, where there are a large number of interested authors and related pages, it is harder to achieve selection as a Key Resource than for a special-interest topic, such as Quantum Physics.

"The Links2Go Key Resource award differs from other awards in two important ways. First, it is objective. Most awards rely on hand selection by one or more "experts," many of whom have only looked at tens or hundreds of thousands of pages in bestowing their awards. Selection for these awards means no more than that one person, somewhere, noticed your page and liked it enough to select it. The Key Resource award, on the other hand, is based on an analysis of millions of web pages. Any group or organization who conducts a similar analysis will arrive at similar conclusions. When Links2Go says your page is a Key Resource, we mean that your page is one of the most relevant pages related to a particular topic on the web today, using an objective statistical measure applied to an extremely large data set.

"Second, the Key Resource award is exclusive. We get literally hundreds of people requesting that their page be added to one or more topics per week. All of these requests are denied. The only way to get listed as a Key Resource is to achieve enough
popularity for our analysis to select your pages automatically. We do not accept fees, offers of link exchanges, free advertising, or bartered livestock as inducements to add new sites to our lists. Fewer than one page in one thousand will ever be selected as a Key Resource.

"You do not need to take any action to qualify for the award. Your page has already been selected and is already listed as a Key Resource. Pages that rank near the top of the list of Key Resources will almost certainly remain Key Resources on subsequent rebuilds of the index. Pages that are ranked near the bottom of the list may be "knocked off" the list or be assigned to different topics on later rebuilds. No action you take, other than steps to increase the popularity of your web pages, will have any effect on future selection."