interestingness | danah boyd

Flickr just released interestingness. This is a fascinating way to browse photos, checking out what people are into.

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.

So, engage a way because your engagement affects the interestingness and there’s nothing like oohing and aweing over the pretty pictures this month.

(PS: they also released clustering so that you can check out tags based on related words. Check out all of the ones related to urban)

Technorati Tags: flickr, interestingness, tagging

7 thoughts on “interestingness”

Ryan Shaw August 2, 2005 at 9:18 am

Have you found an RSS feed for interestingness yet?

c h a n d r a s u t r a August 2, 2005 at 2:11 pm

Flickr’s Interestingness not very interesting

I just checked out Flickr’s brand new feature interestingness. So how do you define interesting? Especially in photography? According to

barb dybwad August 2, 2005 at 3:43 pm

I’m not sure how an RSS feed would really work (though this somehow doesn’t abate my desire for one), because “interestingness” isn’t reverse chronological. The algorithm responds to inputs over time, so relative interestingness will change… I suppose you could generate a timestamp at the “moment of interestingness” and get an RSS feed from that, but it wouldn’t truly reflect how interacting with photos over time affects their interestingness.

shirazi August 3, 2005 at 12:13 am

You have an excellent blog here.

Ben Chun August 3, 2005 at 12:25 am

I have been driving around looking for good clusters (ones that break up into interesting, very discrete, or surprising sets):

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/cameraphone/clusters/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/reflection/clusters/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/abstract/clusters/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/open/clusters/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/food/clusters/

I’m sure there’s a billion, but I’m totally intrigued by the bottom-up formation of these sets. Actually, now that I keep saying sets, I suppose this is like the Google Labs sets.