Beautiful colors on Flickr

I’ve discovered a really fun Flickr party trick. If you want to turn your brain off and just stare at some amazing eye candy, pick a fun term to search for. Suppose you choose Hawaii. But what you really want are dramatic, luscious pictures of Hawaii, not somebody’s bad holiday snapshots. In that case you just click on the “View: Most interesting” link. Then you get a set of Hawaii pictures sorted by the interestingness quality algorithm, which is something like Google’s PageRank. On beyond that, suppose you’re going to do a conference talk about Hawaii and you want to punch things up a little. You’re probably going to want some freely distributable Creative Commons interesting pictures of Hawaii. A quick visit to the Advanced Search page makes this no problem.

But here’s the grand finale: from tag search results page, you can dial up an automatic slideshow sorted by interestingness. And you can roll it all into one juicy URL like this:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/hawaii/interesting/show/

Now you’re ready to blow some time. Pick one and go… color, burning man, Barcelona, Yellowstone, splash.

Now that’s the internet I used to dream about back in 1995.
[via O’Reilly Radar]