findingDulcinea

Spanish-Language News Sources on the Web

To live as a Spanish speaker in the United States means to live in a bilingual environment in which both Spanish and English play a role in everyday experiences and interactions. Compared to the many English news sources available for readers in the U.S., both online and in print, Spanish-only resources are limited. EncontrandoDulcinea is not only a news source in Spanish—it’s a bilingual tool, a way to guide Spanish-speaking readers to the best English resources the Web has to offer.

The Wall Street Journal, for instance, offers a comprehensive version of its original English site in Spanish that focuses on news from the United States and Latin America. The site also includes content on investments, people and lifestyle geared toward a Latino audience.

Similarly, El Nuevo Herald is a Miami-based newspaper that offers news entirely in Spanish on topics that would be of interest to the Latino community. The editorial tone of El Nuevo Herald is lighter than that of the Wall Street Journal, and includes news on entertainment, fashion, health and sports along with stories about politics and the economy.

The New York City newspaper El Diario is another excellent Spanish news source that provides news stories from the U.S. and Latin America with a focus on the New York City area.

At the beginning of March, encontrandoDulcinea started publishing news stories aimed at the Spanish-speaking Latino community in the U.S. The site takes a unique bilingual approach to news, providing original narrative in Spanish and then guiding the reader to trusted news sources in English. In this way, encontrandoDulcinea aims to bridge the language gap, making it easier for the Spanish-speaking reader to access English news sources on the Web.

Anita Gutierrez-Folch
Senior Writer

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Stung by the Facts: We Need Animals

For a while there, it seemed like every time I turned on the news, someone was talking about cutting the pork. A lot of people were quite worked up over projects in the budget that seemed unnecessary. So it caught my attention when I learned that England has recently allotted $9 million to funding an initiative to revive the bee population. It turns out that something called Colony Collapse Disorder is causing bees to die off in record numbers.

OK, I thought. What does this mean? Fewer kids get stung, and Honey Combs cereal has to change its name to High-Fructose Corn Syrup Combs (which is more truthful anyway). Who cares? But as I read on, I learned that bees help to produce one-third of the food we eat through pollination. Basically, without bees, we’d be very hungry.

A few days later, I was reading Nature magazine and discovered that bats are incredibly beneficial to humans. They also help to spread seeds that grow crops. Even vampire bats can be useful, as their saliva may turn out to be a medicine for stroke patients.

I was completely inspired. What other animals are we dependent on that we don’t know much about? Could I prove that money for helping the environment wasn’t pork at all, but rather integral to our survival on this planet?

Well, I don’t know how persuasive I’d be in Washington, D.C., but I did find that in addition to bats and bees, worms, fish and butterflies provide immense value to humans and the environment. And so I wrote “5 Animals We Need to Survive.” Not only did I learn how to make a worm compost for my kitchen, but I’m thinking of emailing my congressperson.

Rachel Balik
Senior Writer

The Significance of Brand Identity

Photo: Wilfredo Lee/AP

One of the stories we recently published on encontrandoDulcinea dealt with the outrage with which fans received the new “tween” edition of the TV cartoon character, “Dora the Explorer."

Dora and her animal friends are extremely popular Nickelodeon characters that appeal to an audience made up mostly of preschoolers. Because of its quality educational content that aims to teach kids about language and other essential skills, parents love the show. Dora has an ample fan base among Spanish speakers as well; early on after the release of the original show in 2000, Nickelodeon launched its Spanish version.

But when toy maker Mattel, in association with Nickelodeon, announced the release of a new edition of the Dora doll, aimed for kids between five and eight years of age, parents were outraged. The new doll is meant to be an older version of the tomboyish Dora, and has long hair and “shapely” legs.

Not only did parents and fans disapprove of the “voluptuousness” of the doll’s new look, they also felt cheated because of the radical change in a brand they had given their loyalty to.

Though it might seem trivial, this story illustrates the importance of building, and maintaining, the identity of a brand, particularly one that has so successfully captured the hearts of their customers.

For more on brand identity, check out our series "What's Next?," which has covered such companies as Nike, Trader Joe's, Costco, Target, Patagonia and Digg.

Anita Gutierrez-Folch
Senior Writer

Sweet Sites | Let's Get Visual: Find Great Images on the Web

Painter Ellsworth Kelly's "Color Panels for a Large Wall" at the National Gallery of Art, 2003. (Photo: Evan Vucci/AP)

One reason the Web has become such an intrinsic part of our lives is that it is not simply a repository of text information. Many times, when you go online to search for something, it’s not words that you’re looking for. Here are three resources that can help you find images.

You can search all the holdings at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., pictured at left, at the museum’s Web site. The collection includes both centuries-old and contemporary European and American paintings, photographs, sculptures and examples of the decorative arts.

A University of Washington database provides images of cities and buildings from various time periods. Search by country, city, style, title, architect, date of construction and other criteria.

In collaboration with various museums, Tufts University offers the Art & Archeology Browser, a database of images and descriptions of coins, vases, sculptures, archeological sites, gems, and buildings.

Amy Goldschlager
Editor

Find your own "eureka" sites with SweetSearch.

Notches on the Ladder to Internet Literacy

In mid-February, the Sunday New York Times wrote about Stephanie Rosalia, a New York City public school librarian who teaches students how to use the Internet effectively. Because that is our mission, it was no surprise that half our staff e-mailed the article to me.

What did surprise me, however, was that the article was the most e-mailed on the New York Times Web site, that it received 75 comments and that it was the subject of 100 blog posts. We have long preached that students will never realize the full benefit of the Internet by using search engines alone. Until we saw the tremendous response garnered by the New York Times article, we didn’t know that much of the world agrees with us.

And this week, we received the best evidence yet that we are succeeding in our mission to show teachers and students how to find credible and comprehensive resources online. First, an article authored by PC World appeared on MSN and named findingDulcinea one of the readers’ choices for “Sites That Will Matter in 2009." The article said findingDulcinea offers “clear value as a teaching aid for kids.”

A day later, we received an even more stellar review from Joyce Valenza, Ph.D., a leading technology writer, in the prestigious School Library Journal. The review described findingDulcinea as "[r]eminiscent of About.com ….with its human guides and structured, contextualized presentation of results, FindingDulcinea offers us more and far more attractively." Even better, Dr. Valenza then asked and answered the question "What does FindingDulcinea do right? It organizes. It evaluates. It creates context. It is conscious of design. It gets media."

I couldn’t have written it better myself. For schools that are not fortunate enough to have a Stephanie Rosalia on staff, findingDulcinea is the next best thing.

Mark Moran
Founder and CEO

Sweet Sites | Don't Know Much about U.S. History? The Government Does

If you're looking for information about American history, you might want to start with resources sponsored by the U.S. government.

The official FBI site has quite a lot of information on American crime. The history section tells the story of the FBI and its role during major periods of American history, from its origins in the early 20th century to today. The headline archives index allows you to browse articles by type of crime.

For more American history resources, consult the National Archives Web site; you can browse the site by topic.

If the government doesn't give you what you want, visit The Internet Public Library; it's got tons of useful links, which can be browsed by subject and subcategories within each subject.

"Women Who Dared" is our tribute to the women in American history. Learn about a month's worth of pioneering American women, including Melissa Etheridge, Marie Curie and Eleanor Roosevelt, in this special Women's History Month section.

Learn about more key players in U.S. history, including the Vikings, Columbus, and Native Americans using the sites in our U.S. History Web Guide.

Amy Goldschlager
Editor
findingDulcinea

Find your own "eureka" sites using SweetSearch.

Sifting Through a Bowl of Capital Crunch: Understanding Finance

Four years, five apartments and one city seven time zones away ago, I was thrust into the arguably geek-chic world of financial media after success on a three-hour writing test taken in an un-air-conditioned Istanbul Internet café—on an evening when the temperature was in the mid-90 degrees Fahrenheit come midnight.

My smattering of style guides and key dates in recent Middle Eastern history, in addition to a commitment to deodorant, got me the gig. But once there, I was in a swirl of currency buybacks and value-added. Did you know the latter is used as a noun as well as an adjective? Example: “Due to the value-added it gains from processing, cereals are subject to an 18 percent value-added tax in Turkey.” Talk about a capital crunch.

That economic conundrum was solved by mixing bulk oats with yogurt and honey—two signature products of my country of residence at the time. For my job, however, financial glossary sites such as Investopedia and InvestorWords made palatable the alphabet soup that can emerge from terms like EBITDA and P/E ratio.

In the time that has ensued since my appetite for financial info sites was first whet, I’ve added financial news sites Seeking Alpha and Minyanville to my usual bill of fare. And OANDA.com’s historical exchange rate calculator is an indispensable little nugget whenever I need to explain to readers in dollar terms the worth of a euro or pound figure.

I myself have a little financial column that launched on Tuesday, “Chin Up in the Downswing.” It not only helps to bolster my own personal stock, it just might make you (or your bestest investor friends) realize that even in this unsavory recession, positive economic and financial indicators are released every day.

Or at the very least, it’ll help wash down your daily serving of Capital Crunch. Financial Crunch is likely sweet as is.

Anne Szustek
Senior Writer

Follow “Chin Up in the Downswing” on Twitter. For general financial information and guides to financial sites, see findingDulcinea’s Web Guide to Personal Finance.

Good News to the Rescue!

Think of the word “news” and you inevitably think of tickers streaming across the television screen, aircraft circling over war zones and anchors looking stern (except if they’re Rachel Maddow, Jon Stewart or Steven Colbert).

There’s a market for good news, especially during a recession. In fact, we just began a daily column of good news called “Chin Up in the Downswing,” written by our finance writer Anne Szustek. Anne is also creating a Twitter account devoted to good economic news. (Read our second, March 12 installment of the series, "Chin Up in the Downswing: Buckle, American Public Education, Short Selling Uptick Rule.")

Sites like the Good News Network and Happy News run the gamut from happy health news to happy financial news. Happy News also has videos and reviews of so-called happy products. Another such site is Gimundo, which also has videos and hopeful stories from around the globe.

The teen volunteering site Do Something has a blog, Celebs Gone Good, that spotlights celebrities who are volunteers or otherwise active in philanthropy.

Netherlands-based Ode Magazine is a proponent of good news (get their news in a nutshell by following them on Twitter). As co-founder and editor-in-chief Jurriaan Kamp explains the effect of the mainstream media, “We only learn about whatever goes wrong. And then we are supposed to believe that that is our reality.”

You can always spread your own positive message through volunteering, which this news story tells us has not been dwindling during the recession. Peruse our Web Guide to Philanthropy and Nonprofits to find more ways to create your own good news.

Liz Colville
Senior Writer
Audience Development

Introducing encontrandoDulcinea, a Cultural News Source for the Hispanic Reader

encontrandoDulcinea, findingDulcinea’s sister site in Spanish, has been live on the Web for about six months, steadily growing in the wealth and variety of its content and expanding its reach with a host of relevant and educational news and features.

Adding to our selection of more than 60 research guides, encontrandoDulcinea now includes profiles, interviews and an educational series.

The material featured in encontrandoDulcinea is intended for bilingual readers who prefer to have Web content delivered to them in Spanish but who understand English well enough to make use of the original recommended sites. The site covers topics and materials that are educational and particularly relevant for the Spanish-speaking community of the United States.

Given the exponential growth of the Hispanic population in the U.S., as evidenced in this recent article by the Associated Press, bridging the language barrier online is more important than ever.

The content provided by encontrandoDulcinea helps to reach out to those who aren’t entirely fluent or highly proficient in English. By creating a bridge over the language barrier, encontrandoDulcinea makes educational and enriching material available to readers who feel more comfortable approaching it in Spanish.

Anita Gutierrez-Folch
Senior Writer
encontrandoDulcinea

Keep up to date with encontrandoDulcinea by following us on Twitter!

Sweet Sites | Magazines, Journal Articles, Books and More

Nothing beats a library, but know before you go using the online catalog WorldCat.

Thanks to my last Sweet Sites entry, "Global Resources for Searching Local News," you should now have just about all the newspaper access that you’ll ever need. Here are three more sites that can help temporarily quench your thirst for reading material.

Search for magazine articles that are available for free online via MagPortal. A page on the site lists the magazines available and what articles have been indexed.

If you’ve just got to keep up with the latest scientific discoveries, you’ll find every research paper published in a NIH-funded journal at PubMed Central.

Why wait to go the library to see if they have what you want on the shelf? Visit WorldCat and get information about books, CDs, videos, news articles and digital collections held by more than 10,000 libraries worldwide.

Amy Goldschlager
Editor

You can get this blog entry delivered to your e-mail inbox every Monday with our Sweet Sites newsletter. Sign up for it here!

Find your own "eureka" sites using SweetSearch.

Essential Twitter Advice, Apps and Tools

The Web isn’t short on articles about Twitter, but we wanted to write a post about the best applications and tools for Twitter—and articles about Twitter—for the findingDulcinea audience, particularly those who are news hounds, educators or simply Web explorers. Without further ado:

Learning the Lingo

What do all those symbols mean? What’s an @reply? What’s a direct message? To learn about the functions that you can use on Twitter, as well as other wise dos and don’ts, read Mashable’s “HOW TO: Build Community on Twitter.”

Desktop Twitter

You can't have multiple accounts on TweetDeck, a desktop Twitter application from Adobe Air. But you can do pretty much anything else you'd want to on Twitter without the burden of a browser.

Following and Gaining Followers

How do you find the types of users you want to follow? Twellow is a great place to start. Search by top-level category like “Education,” then drill down to a subcategory like “Teachers” or “Librarians.” You’ll get a list of everyone Twellow has indexed. Clicking “follow” next to a user will direct you to their Twitter page. Once there, click “follow” if you like what you see. For news addicts, following newspapers and aggregators on Twitter can be a great way to get headlines sooner than you're used to.

TwitDir is similar to Twellow, but also has nice features that will tell you the top users by number of followers and top users by number of tweets.

Mr. Tweet is like having your own personal assistant for Twitter. Follow Mr. Tweet on Twitter and he’ll send you twice-weekly tweets where you can view personal recommendations for who to follow, as well as see other statistics about your account, your followers and people you follow.

Feeding the Beast

If you have a blog or other publication, you can tweet your posts or articles on your Twitter account using a service like TwitterFeed. TwitterFeed requires an OpenID username, but many common services like Blogger and Flickr are part of OpenID.

Learning When to Stop

Twitter can be addictive. That’s why there’s Timothy Ferriss and “The 4-Hour Workweek” approach to Twitter: “How to Use Twitter Without Twitter Owning You.”

If You Just Can’t Stop

Twitter Apps lists more Twitter applications than you might ever need, especially since the number keeps growing.

Liz Colville
Senior Writer
Audience Development

Today is National Grammar Day (and Twitter is No Excuse!)

Get this picture on a t-shirt at Allfavourites.com.

So you can fire off a three-paragraph e-mail in one minute and condense a day’s worth of thoughts into a few 140-character tweets. But how’s your grammar? Modes of communication like e-mail, instant messaging, texting and Twitter are changing a lot of things, like the way we get information, how we consume it and most importantly on National Grammar Day, how we compose it. Today is a chance to treat every utterance like it can’t be spell-checked by Microsoft Word.

The official site of National Grammar Day has a simple message for all those who want to “get involved” in the celebration: “Speak well! Write well! And on March 4, march forth and spread the word. We want people to think about language and how it can be used best.”

One way you can “march forth” is by challenging yourself with the University of California Press’s copy editing quiz, taken from their title “The Copyeditor’s Handbook.” You may feel like you’re back in the classroom where you first took the SAT. But even if you get the answers wrong, you’ll get an explanation of the right answers.

Grammar Girl hosts podcasts about common grammar and usage mistakes. Confused about “which” and “that”? “Between” vs. “among”? Need proofreading tips? These and more topics are covered in a format that’ll give you a nice break from screen-based reading.

Refer back to a good, old-fashioned book, “The Elements of Style,” for trustworthy tips and explanations.

The Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar created the annual SPOGG Awards to expose the users of the worst grammar in the country, awarding both a person and a U.S. city. View this year’s winners and runners-up here. One runner-up in the person category was Courtney Love who, SPOGG says, “generates so many errors per inch of text on her blog that even the best instruments known to grammar scientists have failed to record them all.”

Finally, celebrate at the end of a hard day of perfect grammar with a Grammartini, courtesy of National Grammar Day sponsors SPOGG and MSN Encarta:

1. Pour two-and-a-half ounces of gin, a half-ounce of dry vermouth and several ice cubes into a martini shaker.
2. Shake. (The shaker—not your body or your dog's paw.)
3. Strain into a chilled martini glass and garnish with an olive. If you must, use a lemon twist instead. The Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar likes olives, however. When life hands us lemons, we make lemonade.

Check out our Web Guides to Elementary School English and Middle School English for links to some quality sites and tips on English that you can impart to the young people you know.

Liz Colville
Senior Writer
Audience Development