Compfight for Images

From the January edition e-Learning review I discovered a really neat Web 2.0 tool called Compfight, which allows you to search the Internet for images. Okay so you're wondering can't I already do that with Google? Yes, you can but you have a limited—yes, Google, I said limited set of ways that you can search. Compfight is a Flickr image search tool. Compfight’s thumbnails make it easy to use as well.

Compfight allows you to search for images in safe and unsafe modes as Google does. It also allows you to the license. You can choose "any

license, creative Commons, commercial" to sort the images based on the license. You can also find just the original versions of the picture, its copies, or both. Plus if you like the picture you find this button so that you can tweet it or Facebook it right away.

As a learning management system administrator and a faculty trainer at my college I must confess that it is difficult to help even our faculty users understand some of the ins and outs of copyright, fair use, and public domain items when it comes to their course. Lately we've been talking just a little bit more about Creative Commons which perhaps offers a middle ground, a place where others are willingly sharing their content but also specify exactly what you can do with it. This is what is missing in the general Internet search with Google.

One thing that always concerns when a powerful, new free tool appears on the Internet is its long-term prospects. So many web companies start out as free hope they will be bought out by someone "big." Other companies are hoping that once they get us addicted to the usage their pages that we will be willing to pay for the service. Since change the college is a process not an event, training people to use something new is problematic if that item only last a couple of years. Come by which began in 2008 is already due for some administrative changes. And according to Site Trail it is respectable usage numbers. Still is valuable enough that for now I am advising people to use it before it becomes a pay service.