Newspaper Frontpages from around the World

Some people don't know about this. It's the website of the Newseum in Washington, DC. Billed as the 'World's most interactive museum', it contains a very nice resource of newspaper frontpages from around the world. For example, this morning, via twitter, many of my friends shared links from this website to show a visual representation of the Obama Presidential victory. This morning, Newseum showcased quite an extensive compilation of various newspapers - there were 682 frontpages from 66 countries!

Newseum's gallery of today's front pages is here. (Note: these pages load up slowly - be patient.)

Newseum's geographical index of today's front pages is here.

They even keep an archive of newspaper frontpages for dates and events of particular significance. You can see the list here.

If you are interested in infusing current events into your course materials then access to these newspaper frontpage images could be very useful! (Note: be sure to read their copyright statement before using any of this material. You can find a link to it at the bottom of each page.)

Tip: If you want to see if there are any archived versions of newspaper fontpages for a particular date in the past, then just use the following link and substitute the last 6 numbers by the numerical value of the date (i.e. for May 14th, 2008 use 051408): http://www.newseum.org/todaysfrontpages/default_archive.asp?fpArchive=051408

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Flickr images for YOU!

Flickr allows its users to grant Creative Commons licenses to their photos and as a result many of these images can be available for YOUR use! There are different types of Creative Commons licenses and Flickr breaks them down for you and categorizes its database of photos accordingly. One example of a licence type is “Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivitives License”. What this means is that you can use any image tagged with this license if you meet 3 conditions:

• Attribution: you must give credit to the photographer


• NonCommercial: you must not use the image for commercial purposes


• No Derivitives: you may not modify the image in any way

It turns out that at the time I am writing this posting there are over 23 million photos on Flickr that you can search and use with this license. WOW! It is a veritable Gold Mine for educators putting together course materials.

Check it out Flickr's Creative Commons page here.

Take care

    -Eric

PS: The image above was found on Flickr with a Creative Commons license. Credit to Kevin Day. [http://www.flickr.com/photos/tanagerphotography/556740737/]

PSS: I've posted on this blog before about free image databases, add Flickr to the list now.

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Free Images Databases (sorta!)

It's no secret that I work for the Department of National Defence (DND) in Canada. As such, I am part of the Canadian Federal Government. Any images created by staff of the Federal Government can be shared with other staff for the purposes of government business... copyright free! So when I design courses here at the Royal Military College of Canada, I sometimes consult image databases that are held by the Federal Government. So I contacted my buddy Darryl (see his blog here), who's a graphic designer, and asked him for a selection of the databases he finds most useful for this purpose. Here's what he said:

Probably the best site (quality images, supplied by DND so no copyright issue, usually with a full caption so you know the context, on an operation basis, with links to all three branches) is:

http://www.forces.gc.ca/site/gallery/index_e.asp

A site that also falls in the "safe and useful" category (usable and DND-sanctioned) is:

http://www.combatcamera.forces.gc.ca/common/combatcamera/find_e.asp

Of course, the various branches tend to have their own thing going on, such as Army's ...

http://www.army.dnd.ca/Land_Force/English/home.asp

And beyond that, even the particular brigades and fighting groups have identity sites (where you can sometimes find excellent pictures), for example ...

http://www.army.forces.gc.ca/38cbg_hq/Headquarters/units_page/38cbg_home.htm

If you are lucky enough to be a reader of this blog who's in the Canadian Federal Government then the above links might be useful for your work.

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Quantity vs. Quality: Keywords

The ancient battle raging since the beginning of time shows to sign of letting up. Furthermore, some people still confuse quality with quantity. For example, if I am designing a webpage and I put 1,349 keywords in the header does that improve the ability of web-searchers to find my page? Does the quantity of keywords matter or does the quality of keywords matter?

The reason why this is on my brain this morning is because I discovered a new Google gizmo: Google Image Labeler. It’s a game-based application that pairs to random users together, gives them 90 seconds, shows them a random image on the net and asks them to give keywords that represent it. It claims that it will use these responses “to help improve the quality of Google's image search results.” Hmmm. I’m not convinced that adding keywords to images necessarily will improve Google’s image search results. I’ll tell you why. When I play this game, obviously I have an incentive to get as many matches with my partner as I can. So when I see a certain image, I always try to default to the simplest terms in order to maximize my chances of making a match with my partner. For example, if I see a group of people posing for a conference group picture. I try generic keywords like: “people”, “picture”, “group”. How does the addition of generic keywords like this improve the Google image search results? I’m not convinced that adding more keywords to an image… especially very generic ones… will improve the search results. However, maybe Google knows something I don’t. They obviously do because there a multi-million dollar company… and I am not (*grin*). What do you think about this game and whether or not it can be a useful way to improve Google image search results? One thing that I am convinced of, it’s a pretty entertaining game (*smile*)

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