"I am not a professional photographer," writes moty66, a Flickr member and Kubrik fan, unknown to me, "but a friend of mine gave me a very nice LEICA M6 & LEICA SUMMICRON-M 1:2/35 mm as gift when I was in Palestine three weeks ago, and I tried to make some pictures with it, I used KODAK TRI-X 400 pro."

Looking for a bit of feedback about his first attempt at black and white photography on the relevant Flickr group, he signs off with "hope to see your comments about them".

So, I click his link and take a look. Unsurprisingly, given his post, the pictures are of Palestine. This one in particular caught me eye - of the infamous wall.

And why not? There's a lot of local activity that websites like Flickr have helped to generate, not least the blossoming Birmingham and budding Black Country Flickrmeet Groups, but what are the effects of attempting to gather all the citizens of the world's photos in one place? For one, I can look at moty66's photos of the Israeli "security fence" as if it were my Aunty passing round her holiday snaps over a cup of tea.

Previously of course, we've relied on newspaper photographers, television news and more recently news websites to provide us with this kind of footage, such as this offering from the BBC. Perhaps this pattern would have been interrupted by the odd exhibition at a local gallery.

So are sites like Flickr going to challenge traditional journalism? Do we need a reporter or photographer to distill what's going on in the world into news bulletins, when we can just ask someone who was there themself?

Until today, I hadn't really thought about social networking sites in quite this way. I think that they have earned themselves a new-found respect.