earthalbum.com

earthalbum.com has received a tremendous number of hits for the YouTube edition– in particular, for the Saskatchewan area, due to stumbleupon.com review by Gemma.

However, it hasn’t received a lot of thumbs-ups, most likely because YouTube’s API is terrible. For the Flickr version of earthalbum.com, the pictures are ordered by “interestingness-desc”; i.e., Flickr has some internal algorithm that determines interestingness, and folks who use the API are allowed to sort by this. This is why most of the pictures in the Flickr version are so beautiful, and why the Flickr edition has received well over 4000 thumbs-ups to date.

With YouTube, on the other hand, the “list-by-tag” function returns a number of videos in what appears to be a random order. I’m therefore trying to establish some level of quality ordering by bringing back the top 100 and manually ordering them by a combination of rating_count and rating_avg. We’ll see how it works, but it seems much better so far.

I hope that YouTube changes their API to allow for something akin to “interestingness-desc” at some point. In the meantime, I’ll keep experimenting with algorithms.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 1st, 2006 at 10:41 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.