An Interesting Idea From Derek
I love visiting Derek's site because in addition to great writing, great photographs, and great links, This Is Powazek is also full of great ideas. Today's interesting idea: create a mosaic of photos from your Flickr stream (or your favorites list, or any other photos on the web). I've used Picasa2's Collage feature to create mosaics before (most notably the one commemorating Austen's first year), so the mosaic part isn't the great idea. It's that Derek chose to make a mosaic of the top 20 photos from his Flickr stream, as determined by the number of people "favoriting" them.
This seemed like a really interesting idea—one so interesting that I decided to create a mosaic of my most interesting photos of 2005. "Interestingness" takes account of a bunch of factors, not just whether someone has clicked the Favorite button. (While I do have 20 photos in my Flickr stream that people have marked favorites, I don't have the kind of traffic Derek does—and thus "most-favorited" seems a vast overstatement.) The photo of Austen watching Valerie play the violin, for example, is #17 among my most interesting photos even though no one has marked it a favorite. (How no one could mark this a favorite I'll never understand, since it's definitely one of mine.) The fact that small audience is my most-viewed photo certainly is a contributing factor to its interestingness, but it can't be the only one; none of my other top 20 most-viewed photos made the top 20 most interesting.
So anyway, here's to interestingness—and to being more interesting in 2006.
