Hello,
A brief interruption to your local programming -- the results of the 2008 Picture of the Year (POTY) competition have been released. The winners and results can be read at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/COM:POTY/2008
The candidate images in the POTY competition are those images which have been recognised as "Featured Pictures" during that calendar year. In 2008 there were 501 such images. (This is slightly different to the "picture of the day" system -- these are also Featured Pictures, but obviously there's only 365 of those!) The candidate images are voted on by members of the community, in two rounds of voting.
As with all the images at Wikimedia Commons, the POTY finalists are available to be used and edited freely, including commercial use, without asking for permission. They include a mix of public domain and contributor-created works. Please enjoy this rich and varied lot of works, and feel free to spread the word about the competition results.
Thanks, Brianna Laugher daily-image-l list administrator