A thanks to one, and all, about that Flickr thing

[pecunium]

Explore is Flickr's way of showing off the "most interesting" pictures for a given day.

There are those who regularly are in explore, with dozens, even hundreds, of pictures on the list.

To date I've had three.

1



2



3



None of them were quick to make the list. The fastest was number 2, which popped on about a month after it was posted, and somewhere in the 300s. Alpenglow was at 155, and I wondered what a raft of hits would do.

The answer... knock it completely off the rack. Odds are, it shan't rise back up anytime soon.

So, the means of gaining #1 are still not clear to me. All in all, I don't really care. It would be nice to appear on the front page, but I am not, it appears, the sort of photographer who tickles the fancy of the magical donkey. I'll make do with the people who go all high-pitched when they see the photos (such as the framer, and his assistant, today who spent 30 minutes looking at small images online and telling me they were wonderful), or those who say, "we need to change the art on the wall here, can you have pictures to hang in a week?".

Comments

[zeeth_kyrah]

The algorithm perhaps selects for diversity of interest (many different inbound viewers), but selects against many views in a short period, to prevent someone from hogging the spotlight. So clicks over time may be important, as well as spreading links across the internet.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

The algorithm selects for a bunch of things, one of which is speed of response.

Some of the features for which it selects are "faddish" and (from looking at what pops up with speed) those seem to be more important than things I think of as "good". High conrast, lots of negative space, strong modification; those all seem to be strongly weighted.

My stuff ends up making the grade (I think) because of simplicity of elements, and steady viewing. Alpenglow is one of my most viewed pictures, and it was the one which took longest to make the list.

It was the highest rated, but that means this experiment gave it the steepest tumble as well.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Oh, and I don't know about the many inbound. My stats show 104 hits to that picture yesterday, almost all of them from different pages, and Boom, I was down from 155, to off the list.

So it probably decided I was trying to game the system.