Flickr Interestingness, Contacts and The Commons

Some of the most interesting things happening in my life over the past couple of weeks have been work related, presenting and evangelising Flickr to external partners (sadly nothing particularly interesting personally) so I thought I'd plug some pretty cool features on the photo sharing site (which those of you who know me well know I not only love Flickr but happen to work on it at Yahoo! as well).

Interestingness
Flickr takes a whole bunch of things into consideration when selecting photos for the interestingness photostream, for instance where the clickthroughs are coming from; who comments on it and when; who marks it as a favourite; its tags and many more things which are constantly changing (I copied that last bit straight from flickr.com, sorry). One feature within interestingness I particularly love is where you can browse using a calendar and see most interesting photos from a particular month like March 2009, wicked!

Contacts
Flickr has recently redesigned this page to make it easier to browse your contacts and to straight away see who your most active contacts are, you need to be logged in to see this feature, just head for 'Contacts List' in the nav bar. You can even sort so you see who out of your contacts has uploaded the most public photos to Flickr, one of my Flickr meet-up (another story) contacts has over 15,000 public photos!

The Commons
Another fantastic initiative from Flickr is The Commons where you can find the "hidden treasures in the world's public photography archives". You can add tags and leave comments on photos to make the collections even more descriptive and worthwhile to others. I could (and sometimes do) spend hours browsing these, we even have a few Commons partners from Australia & NZ including the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, State Library of NSW, Australian War Memorial, State Library of Queensland and the National Library NZ!

With holidays on the way in April I hope in my next post I'll be able to show off some new pics from my own Flickr photostream and tell some stories, or perhaps I'll just end up plugging the cool (and very useful) tripit.com website we used to build the holiday itinerary!

Cheers
Tim