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That's interesting

Last night I read Flickr's patent on its interestingness algorithm. Patents are not easy to decipher sometimes, especially if they're written well as this one is, but I think I have some interesting things to share...

(Note: Please don't confuse the following with a discussion about Explore. Explore depends on interestingness, but getting into Explore depends on a lot more than just interestingness.)

From reading the patent, it seems to me that the entire "Flickr System" is largely built around this notion of interestingness, so anyone who says that popularity and interestingness are not important in Flickr universe is dead wrong. My intuition is that Flickr was designed first as a means to provide superior search results to seekers of "media objects", and second as a social network. It's interesting to see that the patent description forsees video and other objects, as well as launched advertising specific to the content of the media object (i.e. image).

The basics of the "interestingness score" that Flickr calculates for each of your images have been discussed here and many places: how many faves, comments, notes, views, and where the views come from (e.g. an award group versus an outside search engine). Also discussed elsewhere is the "how many groups" question (answer: 1-5 good, +5 perhaps penalized).

Here are some tidbits from the patent that perhaps are less intuitive...
--Interestingness is affected by how long it's been since your last upload (it doesn't say how it takes any of these factors into account by the way!)
--The EXIF camera data is important to have. If you are uploading scanned images (e.g. film) it likely won't have such data. My recent lomos didn't get into Explore until I added the EXIF data (I use a Mac, so I used some freeware called "Reveal 1.2").
--Other metadata is important to have. I haven't done "controlled experiments" on this, but my guess if the title, description, tags, or sets are empty, that decreases interestingness.
--Interestingness is decremented over time (e.g. 2% a day); and is decremented in the presence of metadata (in the title, text, tags, comments, notes) of blacklisted words (you can guess what those are!)

I also found it interesting that an image's interestingness score can be customized to the requester of the score. For example, if you've faved a lot of my pics with a particular tag, then other pics that you haven't faved but which have the same tag will show up to you as "more interesting".

Of course, in the end, faves and views and comments and all that stuff is the outcome--the cause is having an interesting photo to start with!

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Uploaded on May 15, 2008 | Map

4 notes / 56 comments

G Bar G Lounge

The G Bar G Lounge. Yes, that's a Green Bay Packers Hearse in the parking lot. Main Street, Mesa, Arizona. Vivitar Ultra Wide & Slim, straight from the camera.

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Uploaded on May 14, 2008 | Map

21 comments

Lucky Liquor Discount Store

You could hardly miss it! On Superstition Blvd in Apache Junction, Arizona, Vivitar Ultra Wide and Slim. (Explore)

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Uploaded on May 14, 2008 | Map

31 comments

Razor thin

The Gillette Fusion razor at about 40-50x. It has five blades, just in case four at one time doesn't do the trick.

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Uploaded on May 13, 2008

32 comments

Empty

Tumbleweed City Park, Chandler, Arizona. Fisheye 2 with cross-processed film.

If you want beauty, go to a national park. If you want to have a get together with a bunch of people, go to a state park. If you want quirky character and unpredictable funk, go to a city park.

And yes, that's my Canon G7 at the bottom of the pic, dangling from my neck. Beware the 170-degrees of the FISH!

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Uploaded on May 13, 2008

22 comments

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kevindooley's photostream

That's interesting

G Bar G Lounge

Lucky Liquor Discount Store

Razor thin

Empty

most interesting

explore

lomo

experiments & macros II

experiments & macros I

abstract

cloud shots

plantware

valley of the sun

museum

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