I am explored!

For two years in Flickr, and flickr-ring, I always wondered how is it to be explored. Flickr's Explore page consists of 500 photos of the day based on interesting-ness and is chosen using a secret algorithm only Yahoo and Explore people would know. Being in explore to some gives them that kind of pride and say: "Hey I am explored!" For some, being explored means winning a lottery. Some add this as a feather in their cap.

My friends kept on asking me, why on earth don't I have any explored photo? I said I don't know why. I really don't know why. I am not really interested, after all. What matters to me are the real comments of my friends who have always appreciated my photos in Flickr. Nevertheless, the question kept on nagging me. So now I am more interested to find out how "explore" works rather than being explored.

So I deleted my Bighugelabs account that provides the service Flickr Scout--the one that looks for your photos in explore. I thought that there might be some problems with my account because there was a time that I unlinked my Flickr account for fear that it would be used by a third party. Then I signed up again, and made sure both applications were linked. Still there was none. So I tinkered in my Flickr account--where I saw I disallowed third party APIs (Application Programming Interface), so I allowed all APIs to run into my Flickr account.  Then voila!  I found one last night!  This morning, I found two.

So after two years in flickr, I have been "rewarded" with "explored" photos--oh well, not that majority of my photos are interesting.  They just did not manage to get into the 500 most interesting photos of the day among the hundreds of thousands of photos being uploaded. [Sourgraping! Lols!].  So here they are: ordinary photos that made to Top 500 in that particular day:

1. Almost blinded, 2. Searching
Created with fd's Flickr Toys.

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Posted in: Blogging and Technology,Photography