Epiphany....

I'm on a mission to reach Flickr's Explore. This is a portfolio of the top 500 shots uploaded to Flickr each day. There are something like 5000+ uploads a minute but only 500 make it into explore each day. It's an honour to have your shot chosen.

The exact algorythm they use to reflect "interestingness" is highly secret but it's common knowlege that it's based on number of views, faves, comments etc so having a lot of people looking at your shot and leaving comments and faving it is good, as is the speed with which it gernates those views/comments/faves.... but. You can't go pimping your shot to many many groups, spreading your next wide... as this goes against the interestingness rating. Keeping it to 5, certainly less than `0 groups is supposed to help.

Over the last week I've consistently been doing unto others as I would have them do unto me. I've been visiting more contacts home pages, commenting and faving their stuff.. but still only stuff that I truly like and I've been getting the same in return. more comments, more faves, more contact requests and a lot more views. My views have gone from an average of < 75/day to over 200 for the last 6 days with some simple yet seemingly effective behaviour changes on my part.

Next I need a stonking great photo at the top of my stream and then go faving, commenting a lot of other people's photos. I'll only post it to a few of my best groups that I know gives me a lot of views (probably strobist).. and we'll see how we go !!