some ramblings
Thoughts on Photo Ranking
Exciting news for Fotola! The folks over at Creative Commons have expressed some interest in putting a featured image of the week on their site, and showcasing Fotola.com as an example of an open-content repository.
But how to determine the featured photo? Read on for some notes.
Automatic Ranking Based on Hits / Links
The current Featured Images list is based on something called the "Views-per-day Average." Which, as you might expect, is the average number of views per day.
The problem with this is as a ranking mechanism is that it doesn't say anything about content-- it's more of a popularity contest. In the end, what will happen is that the top 8% of all fotolae will pretty much dominate the Featured List because they will be getting all the hits. It's how power law distribution works on the net.
Voting-based Ranking
A different system would ask visitors to rank the quality or aesthetic interest of image entries on some scale, and use the over ranking to determine the Featured Image of the week -- the image with the highest ranking that was added in the previous week wins.
This is how sites like the infamous Hot Or Not work, and in theory it levels the playing field pretty well. Because the top fotolae would get more votes on any entry than newcomers, the average rank on the heavy-hitters will tend to get pulled down for all but the most exceptional photos.
The drawback to this is that the viewer must make some sort of value judgement: is this photo a 5? a 6? Certainly amihotornot's interface is less than pleasant for casual viewing-- the point of Fotola isn't to rank photos. We just want to do something special for the entires that strike us as being impressive.
Plus, your open-licenesed photos deserve special recognition!
A Plan For Featuredness
This essay is leading me away from ranking and toward a nomination and voting system for Featured Image of the Week. Any entry that gets more than, say, 5 nominations will become eligible for the Featured Images pool in the next week. The Featured Images for the homepage will be rotated from the larger pool.
There will be a voting-op under each Featured image, and the image with the most votes wins. The mechanism will be rigged to exclude multiple votes where possible, and anybody found to be trying to throw the ballot will be disqualified.
There's all kinds of ways to make this system way too complicated, like giving visitors a fixed number of nominations that they can spend. I think we'll follow the philosophy that simpler is better and see what happens.
The Details
The icon for nominating images will be a yellow star, like this:nominate for featured
By csnyder on May 29, 2003 at 4:11pm