TODAY'S TOURBUS STOP: Today's Front Pages

Howdy, y'all, and greetings once again from deep behind the orange curtain in beautiful Irvine, California, a large, swift-running flightless bird characterized by a long bare neck, small head, and two-toed feet.

I apologize for TOURBUS' irregular delivery schedule over the past few weeks. Your fearless bus driver has been busy shuttling from conference to conference around the country, but I am happy to report that I am safely back in beautiful Irvine, California [blah blah blah]. And -- weather and squirrels permitting -- TOURBUS should be back on a regular schedule this week.

Of course, a "regular" schedule to Bob and me means "Tuesday-ish" and "Thursday-ish," but I digress. :P

TOURBUS is made possible by the kind support of our sponsors. Please take a moment to visit today's sponsors and thank them for keeping our little bus of Internet happiness on the road week after week.

On with the show ...

In light of the recent war, I was going to write a post showing you some of the best news sites on the Internet. But then I realized that you're probably sick and tired of me telling you about Slate's "Today's Papers" at

http://slate.msn.com/code/todayspapers/todayspapers.asp

or Yahoo's "Full Coverage" at

http://fullcoverage.yahoo.com/ .

or Google News at

http://news.google.com/ .

So, instead, I'm going to pull our little bus of Internet happiness into a site we visited last September, a site that is even MORE valuable in time of war: "Today's Front Pages."

Have you ever heard of the "Newseum," the interactive museum of news? They closed their doors about a year ago. Apparently they're picking up shop and moving from Arlington, Virginia, to the corner of Sixth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC.

One of the coolest parts of the old Newseum was this *HUGE* purple room they had that truly defined the term "information overload." Along the base of one of the walls you could see the front pages of over 100 newspapers from around the world. Above that was a giant news ticker, the kind you saw in old movies of New York's Times Square. And topping it all off was a bank of projection televisions showing you live newscasts from around the globe.

In fact, I found a couple old pictures of this room online at

http://www.pjoy.fi/galleria/washington99-newseum1.jpg

and

http://www.sunrisesystems.com/newseum2.jpg .

Cool, huh?

Even though the Newseum has gone into hibernation, you can still find the bottom portion of that wall -- the front pages of over 100 different newspapers -- on the Newseum's "Today's Front Pages" page at

http://www.newseum.org/todaysfrontpages/ .

[Let's see how many times I can say the word "page" in the next sentence.] The Newseum's Today's Front Pages page lets you view the current front pages of 163 newspapers from 25 different countries ... page page page.

The first thing you'll see are thumbnail images of the front pages of four dozen newspapers. Hold you mouse over any of the thumbnails and two things happen:

1. A larger, full-color image of that front page appears on the right side of your screen; and

2. The name and city of that paper appears at the bottom right of your screen.

Moving your mouse over the 48 thumbnails is cool, I guess, but I prefer using the "Map View." Click on the Map View tab at the top left of the page and up pops a window that lets you browse through the front pages from a particular continent or region. [You'll need to disable your pop-up killer -- like WebWasher or Ad-Subtract -- in order for this pop-up window to appear.]

Click on the name of a continent or region and up pops a political map with yellow thumb tacks showing you the locations of that continent's or region's newspapers. Use the arrows at the bottom of the political map to scroll left or right. For example, the US map is so wide that you'll have to scroll left a couple of times in order to see California. Or you can just pretend that California has floated off into the ocean.

Hold your mouse over any yellow thumb tack on the political map and you'll see on the right side of the pop-up window a small, thumbnail version of that city's newspaper's front page. Be patient. It may take a few seconds for that image to load.

Click on that yellow thumb tack and up pops second window showing that newspaper's front page in a larger, JPEG format. If you want to see that front page even closer and you have Adobe Acrobat installed on your computer, click on the PDF link at the top of this second pop-up window.

I apologize if this sounds confusing. It really isn't.

One thing to keep in mind, though, is that the Today's Front Pages page can be a little slow at times. For example, it took 20 seconds to load the PDF of the front page of the Asian Wall Street Journal over my cable modem. :(

Still, Today's Front Pages is a WONDERFUL resource for anyone interested in keeping up with current events or seeing how different newspapers, countries, or even regions cover a particular news story -- like, for example, the war in Iraq.

That's it for today. Have a safe and happy week, and we'll talk again soon. :)