{"id":331,"date":"2008-10-16T06:02:07","date_gmt":"2008-10-16T11:02:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/?p=331"},"modified":"2008-10-16T06:02:07","modified_gmt":"2008-10-16T11:02:07","slug":"flickrs-interestingness-patent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/archives\/331\/flickrs-interestingness-patent\/","title":{"rendered":"Flickr’s Interestingness Patent"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Easter<\/a>
My most ‘interesting’ photo<\/div>\n

One of the things that has always confused me is how Flickr’s ‘interestingness’ score worked. It’s clearly not based directly on views — my most ‘interesting’ photos have ~500 views, while my most popular ones have ~5000. The same is true of comments, tags, groups, etc: Some of my most interesting photos are, all in all, the least obviously ‘popular’ ones. <\/p>\n

However, reading through the patent on Interestingness<\/a>, I see:<\/p>\n

[0027] The statistics engine generates statistics and other metrics based upon aggregated metadata. In one embodiment, the statistics engine determines the popularity of metadata (e.g., tags) within a grouping of media objects over a predetermined time period. For example, the statistics engine may determine the number of different users that have assigned a particular tag to one or more media objects within all groups on the system, within a single group, or within a set of media objects, over the last 24 hours. The aggregation engine may determine (and display) a histogram of the tags, and may determine the most frequently assigned tags (at any point in time or over a predetermined time period) by determining those tags either having a frequency exceeding a minimum threshold frequency or belonging to a predetermined number of the most popular tags. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The patent application doesn’t directly claim that this is used in the interestingness calculation, but this type of time-period based tag aggregation\/valuation is clearly a non-obvious metric that can’t be calculated by looking directly at user-visible information on a single photo.<\/p>\n

Still, none of this really changes the fact that I wish that flickr had a per-person ‘most interesting this week’ sort: my ‘eastern bunny’ photo above has been at the top of the interesting list for ages, and I want new interesting photos, damnit! <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My most ‘interesting’ photo One of the things that has always confused me is how Flickr’s ‘interestingness’ score worked. It’s clearly not based directly on views — my most ‘interesting’ photos have ~500 views, while my most popular ones have ~5000. The same is true of comments, tags, groups, etc: Some of my most interesting […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,105],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-331","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-flickr","category-photography"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/331","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=331"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/331\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=331"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=331"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=331"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}