Added a photo to Flickr. Clicked the ‘Send To Group’ button. Saw the following helpful error:
Instead of dumping out raw XML to a Javascript alert, this might have been more useful if they’d actually output just the msg value from the err element, and ideally into the page rather than a modal dialog box.
In 2007, The Lighthouse organised the Six Cities Design Festival. This “celebrated Scotland’s designers and the importance of design in our everyday lives“. As an off-shoot from that, they have produced a guidebook, “Where We Are: Design Guide to Scotland’s Six Cities“.
A while back I was contacted by The Lighthouse via Flickr, asking my permission to use a few of my photos in the book. I received a couple of copies of Where We Are through the post the other day, including all the photos I’d said they could use.
The book itself is quite nice, paperback journal size. It’s divided up into two parts. The first part goes through each Scottish city, following the same format:
The lists of places is pretty much on the mark, all good places that I’ve heard of or like the sound of.
The second part of the book is a profile of 15 different designers working in Scotland. These consist of a single page feature, an ink illustration of the designer(s), and a few pages of pictures of their work. Designers featured include graphic designers Graven Images, textile designers Timorous Beasties, illustrator Nigel Peake and computer games developer Realtime Worlds.
The book uses photos from Flickr throughout, which is a nice idea. I assume this kept their costs down. It also means it is full of interesting photos of a variety of styles and standards. I don’t think the three photos of mine they selected were necessarily great photos even by my own standards, and I’m sure they could have found better photos of some of the locations. Maybe the difference was I use a Creative Commons licence on all my photos.
The book is launched September 3, and should be in shops soon after (although it’s not listed on Amazon yet). From their press release:
Where We Are features the people and places that are creating Scotland’s new design landscape. Introductions to fifteen of our best designers reflect the increasing success of designers who choose to live their lives and build their design businesses in Scotland. These are accompanied by contributions from design-conscious locals, who know their cities inside out, telling you the unique places to visit, sleep, eat and shop.
The guidebook focuses on design and architecture alongside the strengths and successes of the Six Cities Design Festival 2007. Created as a practical legacy document, the book promotes the work of the best of Scotland’s designers through a series of insightful essays and photography. It includes opinion pieces on current design issues, profiles of the most original and inventive Scottish designers, full city listings of where to go and what to do alongside detailed maps.
Designed by Marque Creative the book is a beautiful example of what Scottish graphic design companies can produce. Specially commissioned illustrations are included alongside a series of photographs that have been specially sourced and selected from Flickr. These create visual portraits of the cities illustrating the listings which have all been compiled from recommendations received from architecture and design aware citizens creating diverse and personalised selections.
I published the above image on Flickr on December 3rd 2007. To begin with, it didn’t get much views. Then it was used in a blog posted by Alex Walker of Sitepoint, and was also included in the May issue of ‘Design View’, an email newsletter they publish. Initially they didn’t credit the photo to me, contrary to the Creative Commons license for that photo. A quick email to them corrected it.
Then a few blogs picked up on it, but traffic died down after the newsletter. But the views for that photo had gone from almost nothing to I think about 1000+, making it one of my most viewed photos. I kept an eye out for it on my list of most interesting photos, but it never showed up.
Then around the 5th July the photo started getting a lot of traffic from Stumbleupon and Reddit. I don’t use either of those, so I’m not entirely sure how it works, but I suddenly got a lot of visitors, and people adding it to their favourites. 12,000 visitors and 12 favourites, all in one day. Since then there’s been over 100 views of that photo every day.
Stop Looking At My Bottom statistics
Currently, it’s my:
So you might expect it to also be one of my most ‘interesting’ photos, as defined by Flickr’s interestingness algorithm (patent pending).
But it’s not. It doesn’t appear in my top 10. It’s not even in my top 100 interesting photos. It’s actually listed as my 1103rd most interesting photo. That just doesn’t seem right.
So, why might this be the case? Firstly, what do we know about Interestingness? According to Flickr’s Explore page “There are lots of elements that make something ‘interesting’ (or not) on 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.“
So it could just be as simple as Flickr disregarding any traffic from the likes of Stumbleupon, Reddit, Digg, Fark, Slashdot etc. Although as long as the Interestingness algorithm remains secret, I’ll never really know.
I’ve also noticed this with another photo:
3,185 views, 33 favourites, 12 comments. 82% of the traffic came from Stumbleupon. It’s sitting as my 1165th most interesting photo. Oddly though, it’s also at number 60 in Explore for the day I uploaded it. Unlike the first example, which isn’t in Explore at all, and never has been.
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