Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Link O'Day: TinEye

I just learned about TinEye today. Anybody interested in various ways to search the web...INCLUDING LS591 STUDENTS...might want to give this a try. It is a reverse image search engine. That means you can upload an image or give the link to a web page where an image is located, and TinEye will look for other sites where the image is used. Why is this useful? Well, I think it is important because it is a way to search and see if, where, and by whom the image is plagiarized. I tried it out with an image of Black Cowboy Bill Pickett. I use him for a sample search in class. Anyway, I used an image of him that I know is used in more than one site. Sure enough I was able to come up with 3 additional sites in addition to the one where I found it. Interestingly, one was a site called "Heroes of Rockdale, Texas." That was my mother's home town and one familiar from my own childhood, so I had a sort of odd circular feeling about the search starting and ending with me. I feel sure the perfectly harmless Rockdale site is using the picture without permission, and also without realizing this is a copyright issue. Who would want to go to all this trouble? Well, YOU would if you had original messages out there on the web that were for sale, and you were suspicious that others were using the image without purchasing and maybe even for their own profit. OR it could give you some information of a page you were evaluating. If the webmaster is plagiarizing, that impacts the validity of the page. Plus, it is just a little fun in a geeky sort of way.

Oh and if you have an interest in Rockdale Texas, the website I found is here: http://forttumbleweed.net/rockdalefamous.html

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