The most interesting woman in the world
This is the most interesting woman in the world.
I need to clarify that (before the divorce papers are filed). This is the top result for the search term ‘woman’, ranked by interestingness, that I found in a search on flickr this afternoon.
The picture was taken by the very talented Babeffe.
What makes for interestingness on flickr? It’s an aggregation of the number of notes, comments, favouritedness (sorry) and links to a submitted image.
The photo itself has been annotated a number of times by users. They point to the slight inequality between the eyes, the shape of the lips and the relationship between the woman, the photographer and the second woman in the picture. The comments are nearly all in Spanish, but my tourist-level translation skills suggest that she’s thought of as very beautiful by a lot of people.
But ‘interesting’? What does that word mean? (adjective 1. arousing curiosity or attention: arousing curiosity, attracting or holding attention, or provoking thought 2. not boring: enjoyable because of being varied, challenging, stimulating, or exciting). Thank you, Encarta.
Yes, she’s interesting. But the definition gives no idea of how to rank interesting things. In fact, it appears to be an entirely subjective quality, judging from that definition. That’s true in normal life too, of course. I tell people that I am interested in Web 2.0, and they tell me to grow-up and get a life. Does the fact that the vast majority of comments are in Spanish not suggest that there is a very strong cultural weighting to the idea of ‘interesting’?
I raise this because my new pal, Tim O’Reilly, has recently written on the subject:
Google made a breakthrough in web search with its original idea of links as citations (i.e. PageRank), and they are still the undisputed leader in general web search, but they haven’t done as well in searching rich media. I think they have some things to learn from Flickr. More specifically, web search innovators all need to think through what makes results “interesting” for a given domain. I like what flickr has done in calling out “interestingness” as a quality worth searching for, and leaving it as a playground for exploration.
I kind of agree. Interestingness is a quality worth searching for. I don’t want the most popular links on the subject I search for, say “mashups”, like Google gives me. I want the most interesting and informative one or two. Oh… hang on… that’s exactly how interestingness on flickr is calculated.
We don’t have agreement on the philosophical meaning of beauty, but we do have computer algorithms that will calculate it according to most people’s criteria. Again, we have a populist interpretation of very personal values. So by that scale…
Picasso is more interesting than Mondrian. That picture of dogs playing poker is more interesting than either. Still interested?
