↑manganite's blog

In principle the last change on the what's hot list is an improvement. More pictures is a good idea, I think. And the list seems to have no certain ranking, at least I cannot detect any, and that's also fine.

But the way how pictures are selected is still a mess. I can't be that a picture is hot if half of the comments are self generated (which leads to the curiosity of pictures with more comments than views in the list) or that comments are only from four or five very talkative people.

If one want to have really hot pictures in this list one should not count absolute numbers, one should count the number of individual visitors and the number of different people who left a comment. And I don't see why this is  not done, cause in the beginning it worked (at least for your personal popularity charts) in this way and suddenly it was changed.

But maybe I miss the intention of this list, and the list is doing exactly what the team wants, but in that case I personally don't agree with this intention.

 

Sorry, but I like numbers, therefor here is something about them ;)

The girl with the purple paras…

Two weeks ago when the new frontpage layout was introduced one of my pictures was shown there for one week. During that time the number of daily visitors of my stream went up from the depressing low number of something between 30 or 40 to something between 120 and 150. That was great, cause the people looked not only at the frontpage picture, they looked also after the other ones, I got more comments, new contacts and so one. That was great!

Now the picture has went away from the frontpage and also the feeling of activity on my stream. That's not very surprising, I know, but something is strange... Still more than 100 people are visiting now my stream. Of course almost all are anonymous ones (the number of non-anonymous visitors is back to same low number as two weeks ago), but why are they coming? I had expected this number will also drop down, cause I thought the visits were only triggered by the picture on the frontpage...

I don't maybe it will go down slowly the next days...

Beside that, there are other numbers to think of. Looking at groups I got a very mixed impression. On the one hand, people are founding, joining and posting pictures to groups very actively. Some of my groups have far more than 100 members and some hundreds of pictures. That's really great. And I also noticed, that people are looking at the pictures in the groups (if you post a picture, you can see an increase in the number of views), but that's it... I don't have the impression that the groups are resulting in more activity like making comments to pictures. That's a little disappointing, I think.

Last time I was complaining about the 'What's hot' list. And I have to say, that this has really improved, since that time. I don't know the reason, but I have the impression the list is now much more diverse, the quality has increased and the number of pictures with icq like chatting comments has dropped down. Maybe that's cause of the new frontpage layout which has moved the focus of this page more in the direction of  photography and more people are now in the focus of attention of a broader group of people as before. And that would be a key to make this place more attractive.