"A first-rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting. "
-Abraham Maslow

My landart has floated to the top of yahoo image search!

This picture of mine was recently 'faved' almost fifty times on http://ffffound.com (here's the link) which resulted in an enormous traffic increase for the original image on flickr, which, in turn, resulted in better ranking for my image in the yahoo image search results for landart. So I am very very pleased with myself, but also a little mystified; why is it that the images that I am most proud of are half as popular as this kind of thing? Don't get me wrong, I like this image, its just that i've done stuff literally ten times as good, but sometimes it would seem as if i'm the only one who thinks so...

What's in a name

I called this blog randomly accesible memories because I often access my own memories in a very haphazard fashion. Mostly through association. The merest wiff of a cologne that's been collecting dust on a shelf for over a decade rockets me onto Cantebury's high street where I bought it on market day lightyears away.

But I don't always know how to get where I really want my thoughts to go.

I have often noticed that unsolvable problems can be best solved by indirect thought.

When I was a child I lived for the moment, and when I thought about my life, which was blessedly seldom, I mostly thought about what lay before me. But the older I get the more I live in memories of the past. And time accelerates like a runnaway train. My memories aren't in folders or lists or any logical order. There might be an index, but I've never seen it. My mind jumps restlessly from one thought to another, randomly accessing my memories.

Experimentation

Everything I do is an experiment. If the picture I make is good or not is of little importance in comparison to what I have learned.

If the experiment 'works' I have the feeling of arrival, of completion, I am finished with the idea. If it doesn't work I often learn far more; it makes me think about why I failed, and often gives me dozens of new ideas.

etsy has promised to start implementing a relevancy algorithm

I like etsy, but there are certain design flaws that make me wonder if etsy's creators have ever heard of usability.

Why do they use flash for statistical data? I have to wait for a whole flash animation to load when i want to see who has 'faved' my shop, and instead of just showing the number of favs next to the view count for my items, i have to click my way through; first to the item's page, and then to the tedious flash animation.

Anyway, they've promised to start using the ranking people give each other's items to help the search relevancy;

"Future phases of Search will include upgrades to the relevancy and ranking of the results. The way current search results are displayed (ranking) is based on chronology (most recently listed items first). We believe that Etsy buyers will be better served by a system that takes into account both ranking and relevance in a way that helps them find items they’re looking for according to various criteria by category. And, for those buyers who may not know what they're looking for, we also hope to introduce later in 2009 tools to foster discovery based on all the hearting and curating that takes place across the Etsy community every day."

Why they didn't use it to begin with will remain a mystery to me, but i hope they make these changes sooner rather than later.

Etsy has too many buying options (i count 15), and none of them work satisfactorily. If only etsy would have an interesting algorithm like flickr, it would work better (and more profitably), and i'd be sellíng more.

Etsy's creators have made some very altruistic statements about helping atists/artisans, and cutting out the dealers ie. connecting consumers directly with makers, but the truth is that if etsy is to succeed (and i hope they will), then they will replace the dealers, and even if they aren't as greedy as ebay or amazon, they will profit by it. So if they want to be good, they should build something that works, not something that just looks like it should work.

Here's a link to my etsy store just to make this more relevant.