I did not attend this year’s Albuquerque Balloon Fiasco, er… I mean Fiesta. I don’t need to because The Albuquerque Convention and Visitors Bureau thinks it the most photographed event in the world.
As of this post using, Flickr as a gauge, there are 7,178 photos or videos taken between 10/03/2009 and 10/18/2009. Is there another event which has more photos on Flickr?
This week’s Photo Friday is “Remarkable.” One of the more remarkable things to see is the mass ascension at the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta, where hundreds and hundreds of balloon rise at once. This picture I took in October of 2004.
Flicker added some new features recently. Besides better grouping of tags, it added a “Interestingness” feature, that tells how interesting a photo is. You can see which of your own photos are interesting and which of the photos from all of Flickr are most interesting.
Several comments on Metafilter suggested that photos they thought were most interesting were at the top of there personal most interesting list. My experience is different, my most interesting photos were not at the top of my most interesting list. So how the heck is Flickr determining what makes a photo interesting or not?
I think I’ve sort of figured out the general formula. Seems the major weight is put on who has marked a photo as a favorite, then the number of comments and finally number of views. But not just the number of views but the time between individual views, so the more views of a photo in a short amount of time has more impact than more views over a longer period of times. Thus, The only way one can show up on the main interesting page is to have lots of eyes looking at it. I also believe that somehow having tagged the photo with more popular tags has an impact as well.
To test this theory I started adding my photos to some pools. Most of them are low membership pools (Albuquerque, Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta, Duke City Fix, New Mexico, Arizona all have less than 200 members) then added my related photos to these pools. I then joined 1 high membership pool, JPG Magazine: 1 photo a day, no borders (greater than 3000 members), and added 1 photo. That photo has jumped from the middle of my personal interesting list to the number 2 position. There has been less than 10 views and 1 person marked it as a favorite. Proving that marking a picture as a favorite has a big impact on the “interestingness” of a photo.
This photo which has had more views and 1 comment is still low on the list. This means that unless you are actively displaying your photos, you don’t have a chance of getting it in the interesting list on Flickr. I suspect there are quite a few interesting photos on Flickr that just don’t have a chance because the users are not promoting them. The good news is, at least, the photos that are showing up on the list are pretty interesting.
They have a great explantion of what they saw
It’s good to see an actual explanation and not instantly assuming it’s a spaceship. As much as I would like to believe, the truth is really out there. I’m almost sure it’s always man made.One might be led to believe that I actually saw a UFO that is an extra-terrestrial vehicle that was large but far away. The fact is that I saw it at a crowded sitr and in a crowded sky. The photo was taken during a hot air balloon mass ascension and a balloon flew behind this curious object after I had taken the photo. Thus I was able to determine the object was no more than a few feet in diameter. My guess (and it is only a guess) is that it was some sort of mylar balloon reflecting the sunlight and caught in the wind, even though it appeared to be stationary and rotating from my vantage point. Or who knows….Maybe they are just really small aliens attending the balloon fiesta like I was!
The 4th of July was pretty uneventful for me. This year I sat on my roof and watched whatever fireworks were going off. The best display was at the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta grounds, which I got on video.
Because of the recent fires in the Bosqe, there has been a big crack down on illegal fireworks. Didn’t stop people in my neighborhood though as I saw several fireworks going off that exceeded the requirements. They were fun to watch, I was just worried that someone was going to catch something on fire. Luckily there were no fires around my house.
What does Bosque mean, I found the following:
Early Spanish explorers bestowed the name Bosque (pronounced boss-kee) meaning “wooded.”
So there you have it, it means a woods.
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