So much is happening today, I hardly know where to begin.
Let’s see, for starters, the great Utata big “summer” (I put “summer” in quotes, since Utata is a global group and it isn’t “summer” everywhere. Hello good people of Australia.) project has been published. It’s called Storytellers and it’s available at this link. For my contribution, I got to dress up as The Stig from Top Gear and pretend-I did an Adaptation of an existing TV program (Top Gear) so you’ll find my contribution to the project, called “The Stig Gets His First Car” under the Adaptations link (or, you know, click here if you are impatient.)
While it’s true that past Utata projects have not only taken out all of Flickr, but wreaked havoc on Flickr’s Explore, in a (perhaps unrelated) topic, it would appear that the “special sauce” behind Flickr’s Explore has been cracked. Yes, you read it here first (or didn’t as the case for denial may be) Flickr’s Explore algorithm has been compromised. In case you’re wondering what kind of magic makes that magic donkey fly, wonder no more. Here’s an excerpt,
“the algorithm rewarded 5 factors: the number of comments, the number of favs, the comment without html, a comment made by a non-contact and the speed in which all of this happened.”
As you know, I’ve never been big on Flickr’s Explore. Like everybody else, I’ve got some pictures in there, don’t know how they got there, don’t know when they’ll drop out, and don’t really care too much about it, but there are people out there who live and die by these things and, in the past, I too have been curious as to what the good folks behind Flickr do to implement this kind of thing. No we all know. But, don’t get too comfortable, snowflakes, in typical “this is Flickr, we make the rules” fashion, the good folks behind the algorithm have promised to “rewrite it completely” to take into account new elements. Yeah. Whatever. I’m not holding my breath waiting for that one.
Finally, in what I hope is completely unrelated news (though one has to wonder whenever any kind of government conspiracy is involved) I found out this week that one of the actors from the X Files, Dean Haglund (a man who played one of the Lone Gunmen) attended the opening reception for the Texas Photographic Society’s Plastic Fantastic show out in Johnson City, Texas. Now, though I have work in the show, I managed to miss the reception myself, so I can’t really comment on this but, I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that he didn’t fly in on a magic donkey being driven by anything resembling a Stig. As with any good government cover-up though, I shall leave this as an “I have no comment” remark-you’re left to your own devices to figure out from whence he came, how he got there, who was driving, and just what exactly happened on that grassy knoll once he got out there.
Until next time…
