as david rightly points out you just can't keep up these days. it used to be the case that cool site of the day was indeed picking from about 100 new sites that had appeared that day. worldwide. and they weren't cool, except they were there which was cool. the coolest one I remember whcih I can't find in the archive was someone who had posted pictures from a nuclear bunker and I thought how amazing it was that someone could post pictures of themselves inside a nuclear bunker and then just use an img tag and publish them and I could see them halfway round the world without leaving my seat and there might be something in this internet thing but as far as I could get at the time was to post scans from scooby-doo annuals.

fast forward about 10 years and remember when you first joined flickr and started uploading your photos worried about whether you should be posting candid shots or posed shots or landscape shots or artistic shots and whether you should submit to that rating group of which there was only 1. because when you joined all those years ago, everybody looked at everyone else's photos. I mean, if you refreshed the explore page after having looked at them all, there might be one or two new ones which might or might not pique your interest. never mind, come back at the end of the day and look at all of them.

not so now. flickr users are now uploading more than 4000 photos/videos/things a minute. that's (hang on, let me open the calctool), um, more than 60 a second. by the time I've refreshed the explore page, even if I just repeatedly do that and not look at anything, about 300 objects have passed me by. so I hope people are putting them in that rating group so I can pass some value judgement on them. what do you mean there's about a million ratings groups? how can that be? what do you mean its an interestingness hype methodology? oh. and while I'm banging on about it, why do I never get any of those "Your photo has been selected for the SWORD OF DAMOCLES AWARD! (insert huge gif). Please tag your photo with SWORDOFDAMOCLES and bother 10 other strangers by blarting this message all over their photo pages! thx!" awards? everyone has those. I want one. not enough cat/sunset photos I expect.

© Tim Caynes. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License

Disclaimer: I work for Sun Microsystems, but this is nothing to do with them and it's all my fault, even though I might sometimes mention Solaris or something.