Flickr interestingness revisited

A while back I posted some thoughts on Flickr Interestingness. While playing around with MyBlogLog today, I noticed a new link to that posting. It’s been a fairly popular piece on my sight, showing continued interest in Flickr Out There.

That link points to — patents involving Interestingness, as well as other discussions about Interestingness posted by others. Very much a message worth chewing on a bit.

To borrow from it a bit:

Interestingness rank is based in part on:

* The quantity of user-entered metadata concerning the media object,

* The number of users who have assigned metadata to the media object,

* An access pattern related to the media object,

* A lapse of time related to the media object, and/or;

* On the relevance of metadata to the media object.

* Whether the media contains undesirable content such as obscene imagery or promotions of a competitor’s product.

One of the questions I had about all of this was how much control the content owner had over interestingness; Does it matter if the caption is short or long? Do titles matter? tags? sets? groups? Some users throw dozens and hundreds of tags on photos; others (like me) tend to be sparser. Does one have an advantage over another?

Or more correctly, ignoring whether the owner’s metadata decisions make a photos more or less likely to be found in a search, does that metadata affect interestingness itself (by, perhaps, indicating interest by the author?)

I’ve been working on — slowly — some thoughts on tags (and how technorati uses them) and how tag usage can be encouraged and improved through automated selection and feedback mechanisms. I’ve written before that tagging of text data needs to be improved, and I think I know of a way to do it — and it probably would improve flickr tag quality as well. In reality, the two problems are basically the same, except that with text, search engines can go build a context meta-data structure that helps “auto-tag” messages, where in photos, if the author doesn’t do it, you’re basically hosed. That’s why I think flickr tags are much more advanced and useful than technorati tags are — and we can learn from them…

As I catch up on the nine million projects I’ve got going…. it’ll appear.

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