When I first learned about Flickr I didn’t understand what the big deal was. It seemed like any other photo sharing site where the emphasis was on sharing and not printing. Photo sharing was nothing unique. Some people raved about tagging, others about the community, but for me the a-ha moment was “interestingness.” Flickr’s explaination of interestingness isn’t very revealing, but it does describe an algorithm with various variables as inputs and a specific score (used for ranking) as an output. Tim O’Reilly hit on a sentiment recently that I felt for a long time: the interestingness algorithm is powerful, and I agree with his comparisons to pagerank and the lessons Google has to learn.

I toyed with the idea of creating a site that aggregates blog posts and rates them on interestingness. Photos on Flickr and blog posts both have the same possible input variables in an interestingness algorithm (tags, views, favorites, links, grouping, quantity of comments, frequency of comments, etc). I got discouraged by the roadblocks of creating an aggregator in general, but it’s an exciting idea, and I would love to see someone run with it.

This idea is totally half-baked, but it has a great elevator pitch: “An interestingness search engine”. Anyway, the idea was part of a running file I keep around with random entrepreneurial ideas. I think I’ll post more (if not all) of that file in future posts. They’re all half-baked ideas and need the fuel of a dialogue if they’re ever going to make it past some dusty, over-heated segment of my hard drive.