Maryville’s very own Daily Times has launched a photo sharing site: Spotted.  Under “You Spotted” Maryville citizens get the opportunity to share their personal photos as well as photos of Blount County events and locations, while “We Spotted” is set to highlight photos from “The Daily Times.”  While writing this post, I noticed that there are no photos under “We Spotted.” Nor are there any Staff members listed.  Come on DT!  If you are going to launch a photo sharing site, you should have photos of your own up and ready to go.  Currently there are 37 members, which isn’t too bad for being live for less than 24 hours.

So how do we benefit from this kind of site? What makes it better than the options that are already out there? Flickr already has a Blount County group if you are interested in Blount County photography.  And I don’t know about you, but I don’t need to see any more pictures of grandbabies (which currently seems to be the most popular subject on Spotted)!  What I am hoping to see is The Daily Times getting involved.  “We Spotted” has a section for upcoming events and I would love to see that put to use as a convenient location for all Blount County upcoming events.

But does The Daily Times benefit from Spotted?  Possibly.  First there is the additional opportunity for advertisement.  Then there are the Terms of Use.  The Terms of Use state:

If you post content on the site (User Content), you remain the owner but grant to Company a non-exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free, worldwide fully sub-licensable right to use the User Content and to reproduce, modify, publish, create derivative works, distribute and display such content throughout the world in any media, whether now known or hereafter created or developed.

While this is no surprise (other photo sharing sites make similar disclaimers), could it be possible that user submitted photos might be used in The Daily Times, thedailytimes.com or blountcountyvoice.com?  Newspapers solicit their subscribers for photos and this makes available another avenue of photo submission.

I am very interested to see if Spotted takes off.  Let’s also hope that The Daily Times makes it a site worth using, by contributing its own content to the site in the future.