following the insanity of the last couple of days worth of flickr stats that are possible when you line up the creases on your shirt with david bowie's head there is the inevitable drop from the flickr explore page and a return to pictures of car parks and old ladies shopping in norwich that really nobody cares about except other people in norwich taking pictures of car parks and the occasional old lady. my experience has always been that real photographers always catch up with you in the end so even though you might have the temerity to be the most popular photo on flickr for a couple of hours with a picture of yourself as someone else take in your hallway with a cheap compact camera during a screen break when you're supposed to be putting a project plan together, eventually, real photographers with enormous digital single lens reflex cameras will flood you with professional shots of cats and bridges, or if you're lucky, a cat on a bridge. or a dog. in a sunset. or something.

I know there is some algorithm going on there somewhere, but I still can't work out how you can go from the top to the bottom to off the list entirely in the space of about a day I know I could just add a photo to every photo pool out there and get every rating group and comment and fave group to do what they do and add comments and faves even though it might just be a pinhole camera photo of a traffic cone at night and it would still be stupidly 'popular' and it would receive a disproportionally huge amount of diamond, top rated, sword of damocles, platinum pic, super fave etc awards with animated gifs going off all over it but what if you just a take a picture that you like and add it to 1 group, albeit a stupidly visible group, and then you get 125 favorites overnight? what point am I making? I don't know. I'm just saying I don't get it but why is that different from anything else cats will take over the world.

© 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.