100.000 Flickr views
22 Mar 2007
Yesterday I reached 100.000 views on my Flickr account. Using the numbers above, that translates in almost 32 views on average for each picture. But of course, my Flickr photo collection has power law (big head/long tail) distribution. Let’s dive into the head.
Most viewed pictures
The top five of my most viewed pictures are:
5787 views and also a favourite of 29 people. My not-so-bad Web 2.0 overview from the early days of the meme (Sep 2005)
5482 views. I have no idea where those came from.
4196 views. A very unappealling Excel scatter plot about anorexia amongst models, used in The next German top model will be thin
One thing you could derive from this top 5 is that I’m better at choosing good illustrations for blog posts than taking pictures myself. None of the top five is a picture that I took with my camera: 2 were made in Excel, 1 with my Get-Remix-Deliver chart generator and 2 are reworked photos from elsewhere.
Interesting pictures further down the list
Just some highlights:
Popular pictures by me
In my list of most viewed pictures, the first one that I actually took myself is:
#19 in the list, 1313 views. What a surprise, eh?
The most ‘interesting’ (according to Flickr definition) picture that I took myself is this one:
214 views, 2 favorites, but nevertheless #6 in my Most popular list. I’ll never understand how ‘interestingness’ is calculated …
The self-made picture with most favorites (a measle 3) is this Nokia N91 moblog picture from my neighborhood:
155 views. The seats are gone now, and they seem to be renovating the building.
My Flickr experience
I became a Flickr Pro user just one year ago, March 19 2006, and I love everything about it. The ‘stream’ paradigm instead of a collection of separate albums, the tags/sets/groups, the notes, the clean layout, the AJAX interface, the uploader, the upload allowance, the clean URLs, the easy embedding and even the way they tell you their servers are down for maintenance. The typical complaints I hear from other people are:
- “it’s so slow”: I don’t agree. I am not the world’s most patient person, but I’m never annoyed by its slowness. I think that in the eye of the beholder. I for one always have the feeling that Mac computers have a slow, luggish interface, but I bet a lot of people wouldn’t agree.
- “I can’t figure out how to add comments/become member”: I agree. When I see Flickr photo pages while I’m not logged in, I find them not too inviting. I can see how people have trouble getting over that first treshold.
But overall, for the photography buff that I am: Flickr totally rocks! If you use it a lot too, make yourself a Pro, it’s the best $25 you’ll spend this year!
To those of you who regularly check my Flickr stream: thanks for helping me towards 100K! Do you have other favorites amongst my Flickr collection? Photos that are exceptionally pleasing or awful? Have some good advice? Let me know!
