Earlier this week, a certain picture in my Flickr photostream started getting a surprising surge of attention. Around 40 people favorited it over a two day period and I couldn't make any sense of it. Then someone left a comment suggesting that I add it to the Interestingness group, a group for photos that have made it into the top 10 on their respective upload day on Flickr's Explore page. This little clue led me to the explanation for my picture's soaring attention: it had a high interestingness ranking for the day it had been uploaded exactly one year earlier from the day its popularity surged. A section of the Explore page features pictures that ranked high in interestingness exactly a year ago, giving these pictures a second life of attention a year after they were uploaded. I was intrigued.

Interestingness is a feature that was added to Flickr late last year that uses a mysterious (largely unexplained) algorithm to assess each photo's... that's right... interestingness. The basis of the algorithm has something to do with a weighted combination of how many times a photo has been viewed, favorited and commented among other less obvious factors. So as I was poking around this aforementioned group dedicated to highly Interestingness-ranked photos, I discovered that some recent changes to the algorithm devalued the interestingness of photos submitted to too many groups. This had sparked controversy with a specific kind of Flickr user affectionately referred to as a "group whore".

Group whores are users who send their photos to tons of different groups in a desperate attempt to garner attention (read: views, favs and comments) which in turn would hypothetically lead to a higher level of the coveted interestingness. Personally, I believe this lowers the quality of Flickr's group features (someone who sends their photo to 60 different groups cannot possibly be engaging with all those groups in a meaningful way). Anyway, my curiosity led me to this discussion where the shit really flies as group whores whine and Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield steps in to try to explain the reasoning for the changes. I whole-heartedly agree with Stewart's justification and think that it will help encourage better etiquette on Flickr, but I'm simultaneously amused by how indignant these people get defending their dubious group spamming. But it also brought to my attention how important the Explore page and its daily top 500 ranking is to a subset of Flickr users. I'd never considered this before... it turns out there is even a tool out there that lets you see which of your photos made it onto Explore's top 500.

I've never really given the Explore page much attention, but I get a lot of mileage out of interestingness when browsing photos by tag. I have found that sorting tag search results by interestingness is an easy way to get through a lot of filler and find some really good pictures. I guess this means I put some degree of faith in the algorithm. What do you think?

I have often wondered about "interestingness" because of this weird photo of mine, which for some reason received over 2000 views the first week it was up.

It is, perhaps, one of the dullest photos I've posted, in my opinion. But 2000 people say otherwise, and I have never figured it out, except to guess that it has to to with the word "aliens" in it's title.

Just one of the mysteries that plagues my mind after midnight ...

yea... it can be really strange. after I told my friend Vidalia about my findings, she used Flickr Scout to make a poster of her Explore-ranked photos and uploaded it and strangely it jumped to almost 2000 views in less than a day! IT DOESN'T MAKE SENSE! or does it?

This should explain it all.