ajft

Who views my photos, why, how often, what brings them here?

Every day or so I check with Flickr to see what is being viewed the most, and what has been viewed the most overall.

Oddly, my most viewed image has more than ten times the views of the next most viewed, and to me is a fairly boring bland photo. Linking to it here would only drive the view count up higher, so I won't!

  New office desk, just like the old office desk
  1760 views / Nobody counts New office desk, just like the old
  office desk as a favorite / 0 comments

It hasn't been there a great deal of time more than other photos, it's only posted to one group, nobody posts comments on it and I have no idea why it gets viewed so often. Any ideas?

Next on the list

  10/365 - Dad, are you sure this is an approved baby carrier?
  116 views / 1 person counts this as a favorite / 1 comment

Now I can see why number two is popular, but not number one. Very puzzling.

Generally the most recently posted photos get a few views, I guess from my friends and contacts as they popup in feed-readers and various "what's new" lists, but oddities stand out and I'd love to know what causes them. Surges of interest seem to come and go; one day it'll be tandem bicycles, the next Milford sound, the day after that any parrots. Topical subjects in the news, both very local and world-wide, act as triggers, the PBS/RRR Community Cup and Melburn-Roobaix both kicked off an interest as their times of year came arond. Of course this posting itself will have an effect, you can't measure something without affecting whatever it is you're measuring….

Tinkering about I add tags here and there and have found that the more, and better, tags that photos have then the more likely it will to be viewed — hardly surprising, it means people can find it. They're tagged, and where appropriate I try and find machine tags to add, and nearly all have latitude and longitude information in the EXIF data and in the geo-tags and can be found on the Flickr map.

Photos of the two weeks in China seem to attract a continual low-level interest, but nobody ever leaves comments on them so I have no idea who is looking at them.

All in all its a fascinating insight into what appeals to others, from a set of photos that vary wildly in quality and interest.

From the "Not quite the semantic web department" come a semi-standard use of Flickr's machine tags to label images with the genus and species.

For example, my photos of the Laughing Kookaburra (Dacelo novaeguineae), would be tagged with:

taxonomy:genus=Dacelo
taxonomy:binomial=Dacelo_novaeguineae

Hmm, I wonder if there are other conventions for kingdom, phylum, class, order and family?

References:

• http://pigsonthewing.wordpress.com/2008/07/04/triple-tags-on-twitter/

Continuing the conversation with myself — a possible sign of madness — and answering my own question from above, here are all the semi-standard taxonomy tags for the Wedge-tailed Eagle (Aquila audax):

"Aquila audax" "Wedge-tailed Eagle" bird taxonomy:kingdom=Animalia taxonomy:phylum=Chordata "taxonomy:class=Aves" "taxonomy:order=Falconiformes" "taxonomy:family=Accipitridae" "taxonomy:genus=Aquila" "taxonomy:species=audax" "taxonomy:common=Wedge-tailed Eagle" "taxonomy:binomial=Aquila_audax"

A text extract of the Australian bird list from wikipedia, a couple of minutes and a brief perl script and I've got myself a ~/bin/bird-tag that will generate the list of tags.

Not sure what I think of tags. I think they're a poor mans meta-data, for those people to lazy to properly annotate things, or those developers too lazy to develop decent interfaces to allow proper annotation. I've already had a run-in with the multiple possibilities of Victoria, for example. Today I tagged a fotothing foto that had contained a lion, then looked for other lions. I got told that similar tags included dandelion, sealion, and pavilion. Ok, I'll accept the first two, but the third made me nearly splutter my coffee out my nose.