Flickr stats revisited

A while ago, I posted to the blog my thoughts about how I could use Flickr to help me choose/confirm choices for up-coming competitions. Of course, this means I need to get those images on Flickr a good deal before the competitions. Failing that, I can always look back with hindsight, and see if the placings (or not) in competitions match up to the "interest" in an image, as calculated by Flickr.

Below is a screenshot of the most recent stats for my photostream on Flickr. The "star" means favourite by another user, and the bubble means "comment".



Interesting that Window and Chair and Sunset Beach Walkers are up there (in 1st and 3rd place); these did v well for me last year. Bath Crescent is second, but did nothing last year (although did get selected for the Annual Exhibition this year), so not full agreement with the Flickr stats. White Peacock bombed in a recent projected image competition, although is 4th on Flickr. Reculver got a Highly Commended, and it's 5th on Flickr, so not bad there. Shadowman, 6th on Flickr, won me Creative Image of the Year in 2007. Peek-a-boo (Flickr 21) got me a 3rd place, but it's not been on Flickr as long.

So, mixed bag. I think I need to standardise things. I need to submit all images to the same Pools (for exposure to wider Flickr) and then track the interest for a set period of time. I assume views = interest, comments = more interest and favs = more still, which is kind of how Flickr works it out. Also, I think I need to standardise the tags on images. This is almost impossible, since different images need different tags, unless I pick very generic ones (like camera model) or don't use tags at all for all images.

Interesting from yesterday's Cambridge night posts, the order is Kings 1, River Cam 2, Clare Bridge 3, which is what Dams thought too.

Still, useful to see some rough agreement between results and Flickr, but it's not statistically controlled, so impossible to draw any conclusions as currently running.

Thoughts? Suggestions?

Ivan