Yahoo’s photo sharing service, Flickr, added a couple of interesting features yesterday to help surfers navigate the immense number of photos uploaded onto the site. The more, um, interesting feature rates a photo’s “interestingness.” Other words you didn’t know existed: frogery, abligurition, euneirophrenia, flocinaucinihilipiliphication, and zenzizenzizenzic.
The other feature is called “clustering,” a way of investigating tags that are related. If you search for love (and be honest, who doesn’t?), for example, you’ll find photos depicting various representations of the word along with other associated words like heart, kiss, hug, romance, couple, and amore. The clusters depend on how submitters label their photos for you to explore.
Speaking of explore, the new features can be access on Flickr’s new Explore page, which gives the browser a nice user-friendly portal into several photo searching options.
My favorite is the “interestingness” feature. Interestingness is a ranking algorithm based on viewer behaviors like how many click on the photo for a closer look, how many users add the photo to their favorites, and somehow examining the relationship between the uploader and the people commenting, “plus a whole bunch of secret sauce.”
“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,” as stated on the Webpage.
Now if I can just figure out how that picture of me from New Years got on there
