icegov2012 proceedings

egion that is more representative of the continent with respect to
median number of Web pages is Eastern Africa.
Once again, Eastern Africa, together with Northern Africa
(Median=38) was more representative of the continent
(Median=31) in terms of the median number of inlinks to
government portal Websites whereas central African government
portal Websites attracted the least number of inlinks (Median=10).
Government portal Websites for Southern African countries
attracted the most inlinks (Median=78), although Western African
government portal Websites (with more countries, 14 versus 5)
attracted the most number of inlinks (Total=12,811).
The number of outlink counts, although understandably far greater
than inlink counts, follow a similar pattern. The number of
outlinks that point to domains and those that point to full URLs
for the whole continent are close in terms of both total counts
(216,525 for Domains versus 207,231 for URLs) and median
values (852 for Domains versus 528 for URLs). The combined
numbers of outlinks (Domain + URL) for two of the five regions,
Southern and Western Africa (with 19 countries), are about three
times as large as those for the other three regions and their median
counts are larger as well. Southern Africa’s figures for outlinks
are parallel to the total number of Web pages. It could be
explained by the fact that the large number of pages is perhaps an
indication of the varieties of information sources provided by the
government portal Websites because they have to point to a lot
more number of resources. The figures for Web impact factor
show that regions with smaller number of Web Pages and outlinks
on their government portal Websites have relatively less online
impact, although the median Web impact factor values do not
vary a whole lot among the regions (ranging from 0.39 to 2.08).
In addition to the number of Web pages as well as the number of
outlinks and inlinks for African government portal Websites as a
continent, in order to see the effect of population size, further
analyses were conducted. Five groups of the 50 countries were
formed (with 10 countries in each group) due to the huge range of
the population size (Min=89,188; Max=155,215,573). Forming
groups of the countries based on range of population size with
equal width (i.e., total range divided by the number of groups)
would have created a group of one or two countries in some
cases.The numbers of Web pages on government portal Websites
for the five regions were, on average, not that different than each
other. In fact, the least populous countries had, on average
(Median=37), only seven fewer web pages on their government
portal Websites than the most populous nations (Median=44). In
actual fact, the government portal Websites for the least populous
countries attracted a lot more hyperlinks or inlinks (Median=56)
than the government portal Websites of the most populous nations
attracted (Median=38). A bit of an anomaly in the figures for the
median number of inlinks is the one for the second least populous
countries with 13. The least populous countries, however, had
government portal Websites with much more outlinks (Domain +
URL), on average, than the most populous ones (Median=2,722
versus Median=903). While the impressive figures for the least
populous countries were due to the large number of outlinks from
government portal Websites for Swaziland, the weak number of
457
total outlinks for Kenya (whose portal was not often accessible to
the crawlers and tools used for the study), Tanzania, and DR
Congo reduced that average for the most populous countries.
When it comes to the Web impact factor, population doesn’t seem
to be a huge factor with both the least and most populous
countries having similar values.
4. CONCLUDING REMARKS
One sign that, in the last decade, there was a tremendous
information and communication technology expansion in Africa is
the rate of increase in the number of Internet users. Whereas the
population of the continent's 50 countries considered for analysis
in the current study in 2010 was a little under a billion, in a year,
it grew to over a billion, an increase of a mere 1.5% [3]. During
the same time period of one year, the number of Internet users for
the same 50 countries grew by an impressive percentage of
3080% [3]. With this increase in capacity and infrastructure
comes increased e-participation and demand for e-services by the
citizens in all aspects of their lives, including in their dealings
with government. This is precisely one of the reasons why a study
of African government portal Websites and the nature of their
hyperlinks is necessary to measure their effectiveness as means of
communication as well as information and service delivery tools
that could boost a country's online visibility and effectiveness in
online e-government service delivery. The current work is one of
very few such studies. Although hyperlinks provide some
information as to a Website's impact, value, and utility, contents
of such Websites need to be investigated to give a fuller picture of
the progress the continent made in terms of e-government
development and service delivery.
5. REFERENCES
[1] Brin, S., & Page, L. (1998). The anatomy of a large-scale
hypertextual Web search engine. Computer Networks and
ISDN Systems, 30, 107–117.
[2] Heeks, R. (2002). E-Government in Africa: Promise and
practice. Information Polity: The International Journal of
Government & Democracy in the Information Age, 7(2/3),
97-114.
[3] Miniwatts Marketing Group. (2012). Internet World stats:
Usage and population statistics. Retrieved from
http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats1.htm.
[4] Rorissa, a., & Demissie, D. (2010). An analysis of African e-
Government service websites. Government Information
Quarterly, 27(2), 161–169.
[5] Tang, R. & Thelwall, M. (2008). A hyperlink analysis of US
public and academic libraries' Web sites. Library Quarterly,
78(4).
[6] Thelwall, M. (2001). A web crawler design for data mining,
Journal of Information Science, 27(5), 319-325.
[7] Thelwall, M. (2009). Introduction to Webometrics:
Quantitative Web research for the social sciences. San
Rafael, CA: Morgan & Claypool.