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?

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