Interestingness

This entry was published at least two years ago (originally posted on August 3, 2005). Since that time the information may have become outdated or my beliefs may have changed (in general, assume a more open and liberal current viewpoint). A fuller disclaimer is available.

I’m probably one of the last people to actually make mention of this, but the big news in the Flickrverse over the past few days has been the introduction of two new features: tag clusters and ‘interestingness’.

Tag clusters are a great addition, analyzing photos by all the tags associated with them and then ‘clustering’ them with other photos with similar groups of tags. This allows for distinguishing photos of feline tigers from operating systems code named tiger, even though they both share the common ‘tiger‘ tag.

Interestingness‘ is much more vague. Here’s how Flickr explains it:

There are lots of things that make a photo ‘interesting’ (or not) in the Flickr. Where the clickthroughs are coming from; who comments on it and when; who marks it as a favorite; its tags and many more things which are constantly changing. Interestingness changes over time, as more and more fantastic photos and stories are added to Flickr.

In a sense, it works in a somewhat similar method to Google’s Pagerank system, using community interaction with the photos to determine what’s catching the communal eye at any given point. Page views, number of comments, how many people have marked a photo as a favorite, and the tags and groups a photo is assigned to seem to play a part in how ‘interesting’ it is deemed. Obviously, this isn’t a qualitative ranking of the photo itself, and shouldn’t be seen that way, but it’s a very nifty way to go bouncing through the Flickrverse and discover photos you might not have found otherwise.

Each user has now gained a list of their top 200 ‘most interesting’ photos as determined by the system. I was somewhat amused to check mine and find that of my top five, only one of them is actually a picture that I’ve taken — the other four are screenshots or satellite photos from other sources. I think I’ve got a lot more photos that are a lot more interesting than those — but then, a computer algorithm is only going to do so well at figuring this stuff out.

Here, then, are my current top five ‘most interesting’ photos:

Satellite view of the line to view Pope John Paul II laying in state. Punk Love I - Innocence Quicktime 7 rocks! Steve Jobs is Willy Wonka. Or something. My walk to work

And, for entertainment purposes, my current ‘least interesting’ photos (though these change more frequently, and as the ranking only counts 200 out of the 3492 photos I’ve uploaded so far, I guess they still count as pretty interesting…programmatically, at least):

Jake, Chris, Samantha, Jeff, Manuel, Josh, Seattle Weblogger's Meetup, Seattle, WA Fremont Solstice Parade, Seattle, WA Gay Pride Parade, Seattle, WA Blowing Bubbles, Fremont Solstice Parade, Seattle, WA 'Electric', Art Rage Studios, First Thursday Art Walk, Seattle, WA

iTunesSomebody” by Veruca Salt from the album For the Masses: A Tribute to Depeche Mode (1998, 4:05).