If you are interested in retail photography, Google is launching a new service called "Trusted Photographers" that can help individual businesses find and hire photographers to take Google Indoor Maps pictures of their stores and post them online. This is part of their Business Photos (Google Maps). A list of "Trusted Photographers" participating in the program, sorted by city, is available online.
As usual with all things Google, the terms of the program have a series of quirks, and the information that explains the program is not organized very well for outside-the-GooglePlex human consumption. For example, the business that pays for the pictures cannot review them before they are published online, but they can make editing requests after they are published. From a Google perspective this optimizes the process and accelerates the posting of the pictures. But from a photographer's defensive business practice perspective, this can easily lead to the photographers getting yelled at by angry businesses who paid them and did not read or understood the terms and conditions of The Google. The paying customer is the retailer, not Google. Another example, if you are interested in the program as a photographer, they have a simple contact form with no other details. You can reverse-engineer some of the details by looking at the FAQs for the retailers.
On the plus side, perhaps being part of the program is going to look good on a photographer resume. Google's Trusted Photographers has a nice ring to it. You can even run for political office with such a title ;-)
Via Techmeme, Search Engine Land, PC Magazine
