by Andrew Wilber
Staff Writer
2002 Bryan graduate Dan Evans and Bryan College I.T. employees James Sullivan, Network Administrator/Dept. Manager and Matt Meloncon, Online Applications Programmer, have created a web-based application to help bloggers locate and use photos in a way that is easy, free and most importantly, legal.
The service, called Wylio, searches the photo-sharing site flickr.com’s Creative Commons database of over 40 million files for photos that match the user’s search. It then allows the user to resize them and generates a code that can be easily copied and pasted into a blog post.
Wylio also generates a footnote containing the photo’s copyright information, making it legal to post. This cuts what is normally close to a 20-step process down to just three steps, according to Evans, who was inspired to create the application by seeing how long it took his wife, Rachel, to add a photo to one of her online articles.
“She was taking all this time writing the article, and then to put an image in just to spice it up a little bit was taking her 20-25 minutes,” he said, counting up all the steps required to legally add an image to a blog post. “She ran into the problem, so I said: ‘You know I bet there’s a way we can actually solve this.’ So I brainstormed about it, and then I came to James and Matt,” he said.
While the idea was born out of Evans’s personal interest in helping his wife, it soon generated a level of excitement in the online community that no one could have anticipated. When the technology news website TechCrunch.com featured Wylio in a Nov. 5 article, referring to it as “a startup out of Dayton, Tennessee” with a solution for bloggers, viewership for their website, wylio.com, rose exponentially.
“The weekend TechCrunch picked us up it was in the millions,” said Sullivan, who collaborated on back-end programming for the project.
“It was really kind of a shot in the arm,” said Evans of being featured on TechCrunch. “It’s like whoa! It gives you legitimacy,” he said, adding how he feels they have created a service that people really need.
“Even if you’re not that concerned about copyright, the ease of just getting an image is there too,” said Sullivan. “We’re trying to play both sides. We’re trying to be nice for the bloggers, where it’s nice and quick and easy for them, but also we want people who are putting their images out there to be happy as well.”
“Like recently I saw an article from a pro photographer who was happy with Wylio,” said Evans. “It’s good when you see the photographers are happy with it and the bloggers are happy with it.”
While the application has had major success in it’s current form, all three developers stress that this is only the beginning.
“Just keep watching,” said Meloncon, also a Bryan grad who worked on the front-end programming for Wylio. “I think it will continue to improve and continue to grow. According to our stats, we’re constantly growing.”