Interestingness Is to Flickr As PageRank Is to Google
Interestingness is a measure of the popularity of a photograph on Flickr. While the exact recipe for interestingness is a secret--"proprietary" in corporate speak--here's the general idea as told by Flickr itself:
"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."
There's an implication of recursiveness in this description. My photograph will have more interestingness if the people who view it, comment on it, and mark it as a personal favorite themselves have a high interestingness quota--which, in turn, can only be the case if these people have been favorited (etc) by those with relatively high interestingness.
The recursive nature of Flickr's interestingness makes it analogous to Google's PageRank--the complex site ranking system used by Google that ranks sites fundamentally using the PageRanks of the sites that provide links ("inbound links") to the ranked site.
You could also look at Amazon's collaborative filtering mechanism ("people who bought what you bought also bought x,y, and z") as somewhat similar, although the recursive nature of the process is lacking.
Interestingness on Flickr, PageRank on Google, and collaborative filtering on Amazon all point to one fundamental about the Web: its power is in community.
My experience with Flickr is that interestingness works fairly well. It is closely (but not exactly) correlated with number of views and number of people who have "favorited" an image.
When a community works well together it is a democracy in the best sense. However, a collection of people can easily degenerate into a conformist mob, and may not have good judgment--a hazard for these recursive and collaborative algorithms. The best photo in the world on Flickr will not be ranked very interesting if people with good interesting kudos don't recognize it, just as the best Web content in the world may go ignored by Google without the right kind of inbound links.
It's also interesting that interestingness changes over time. As with Google rankings, an interestingness ranking on Flickr is fickle and ephemeral. Today's top photo may well not be ranked so well some time from now.
Here's my (currently) most interesting photo on Flickr (I like the photo too!):
Posted by Harold Davis at October 31, 2005 01:53 PM
