Flickr Interestingness slideshow

I uploaded my first photos to Flickr in January of 2008 and its been a over a year now that I've enjoyed the benefits of having a Pro account. I have to say that more than any other internet "fad" (for lack of a better word) I truly enjoy this service and can see myself using it "forever". I could not say that for AOL in 1994, Friendster in 2001, MySpace in 2006, and even Facebook in 2008. Of course these are all "social networking" sites. Yup, even AOL (especially at the time) is / was a social networking site.

Anyway, Flickr is (to me at least) not a social networking site. Sure, it has social networking features (contacts, comments, favs, profile, groups, etc.) and people use it as such. Hey its even got porn. But to me it is purely a venue to explore (pun intended), enjoy, and further my photography and I am sure that it has essentially done that in the past year. In addition to that it has allowed my wife and I to extensively share our experience of having our first child, Clive with our family and friends. That is a considerable mark towards Flickr's social networking statue. Touche!

Flickr has a section called "Explore" where a select group of people choose images that they feel are unique and feature them on this page. People like to talk about this on Flickr extensively; citing that this and that were "Explored". Usually the indication of whether your photo has been "Explored" is if your stats blow up during the course of between 1 and 7 days (the length of time it remains featured through the link on the Explore page "Interesting Bits from the last 7 days"). But there are a couple of web site that will search the database for your username. See, that's just it... these words... Explore, Interesting Bits... What is it? Well, apparently that magical "group of people" came up with something called "Interestingness". Its an algorithm somehow balancing the number of views, comments, external link, and favs a photo gets and the more of each together scores you a higher interestingness.

Wow! Why am I boring you with all of this? I actually don't know. I mean only like 2 people read this and I'm basically talking to myself. Maybe its some sort of training for a future in broadcasting?! And now, to complete my point, which was really just to show you my set of photos from the last year and a half or so that Flickr considers to have "Interestingness", well at least these photos show up on the first couple pages of my "most popular bits". Enjoy!