Interestingness

2006 term coming from a FlickR rating - similar to Page Rank?

• http://www.flickr.com/groups/interestingness/discuss/72157594198846477/
• Tim OReilly likes it
• Andrew Parker thinks it could be applied to WebLog posts (Blog Search).

I’m Alistair Croll. I spend much of my life solving for interesting.

The Art of Gig newsletter is for people who want to solve for interestingness, learning, variety, and adventure through gig work, particularly independent consulting work. (Venkatesh Rao)

Venkatesh Rao: As Edmund Phelps (see footnote 2 of Towards a Mass Flourishing) notes, based on data from the World Values Survey, that “How the survey respondents in a country valued the ‘interestingness of a job’ (c020 in the WVS classification) was significantly related to how well the country scored in several dimensions economic performance.”

I'd guess that true emergent properties are pretty rare, and mostly limited to physical irreversibility. But we call lots of stuff an emergent property, and I think we mean "when something becomes interesting to humans". emergence

Dorian Taylor: ...reminds me of a vintage Bruce Sterling quip: "interesting is not important (meaningful); you don't put things into the 'interesting' hopper and get 'important' out."

• The term “smart city” (smart cities) is interesting yet not important, because nobody defines it.