If your e-mail address is on a Web site in the South African domain you have probably already received an unsolicited message from the South African Internet Research Institute (SAIRI). Almost 8 000 such messages were sent.
"This is an unsolicited message. SAIRI is sending unsolicited e-mail ONLY ONCE. We are conducting a survey of the status of the Internet in South Africa and NEED YOUR PARTICIPATION," the message reads.
SAIRI consists of Guy van den Berg in his spare time. Van den Berg returned from the US in 1998 and became involved with the Internet service provision and Web development industry. "I began to feel there was a fair amount of dissatisfaction from a number of Web site owners in what they were achieving on the Web," he says. "This is when I began to conceptualise SAIRI. I started spidering the co.za name space, but ran out of resources to continue the project at that time [the end of 1999]."
SAIRI is now supported by Brainwaves, the Internet services company he co-founded in 1999. Brainwaves will use the data collected through the SAIRI in the run of its business, but a collated report will also be available on the Internetresearch.co.za site.
"I want to make it quite clear that this survey is not a commercial exercise," Van den Berg writes on the site. "I hope to gain a better understanding of the marketplace and an understanding of the problems and successes that you, the Web site owner, has encountered. Along the way, if I can share this information with you, and if it can be of value to you, great!"
Van den Berg says despite its impressive name, SAIRI remains a personal project.
Web site owners and administrators are proverbial for their hatred of unsolicited commercial e-mail or spam. Van den Berg says he does not condone it either, but had no choice but to use mass mailing. "It was the only method that I could reach South African Web site owners in any numbers that would be significant."
Initial data and e-mail addresses were collected using Web agents or robots that visit individual sites. Van den Berg says his "spiders" successfully visited almost 27 000 South African sites and collected almost 8 000 e-mail addresses.
Initial results show that only 16% of Web sites visited use meta keywords in their page headers, something that concerns Van den Berg. "It means these sites cannot be indexed by most search engines." He also found that while an average of 4.6 dotcoza domains are registered every hour, more than 15 000 of the domains visited have no Web sites.
The survey results, expected to contain responses from between 600 and 700 Web site owners and maintainers, are scheduled to be available within two weeks. The interim results are available on the Internetresearch.co.za site.
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