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I have a digital camera. I purchased it about a year ago. I like to take a lot of pictures, and I end up taking a lot more with a digital because I don’t have to worry about film and developing costs. When I realized how quickly I could overwhelm the 20 megabyte limit on my personal webpage with digital photos, I decided to get a Flickr account. Because I was initially taking photos of anything and everything, I decided to pay a few bucks and get a Flickr "Pro" account, which allows you to put up nearly unlimited photos, although there is a limit to how many you can post in any given month. I have never even approached that limit, so I'm quite happy with the Flickr service.
I have cats. I have had cats for almost all of my life, with only a few gaps when I was unable to keep them. Whenever possible, I allow my cats the freedom to go out into the world if they wish to do so. Most of them do so wish, and a number of my cats have been quite prolific hunters. Part of the problem some people seem to have with cats is the fact that, as hunters, they tend to kill things. Sometimes they make quite a mess killing things. This issue is compounded by the fact that, if your cat likes you, it will leave "presents" for you. Presents such as rats, gophers and birds. Sometimes these gifts are partially eaten. I take this as a simple, if messy, fact of life.
Now, combine these two facts and what do you get? Well, in my case, I take pictures of the presents my cats leave me, and I then post them on my Flickr account. I've created a photoset which I call "The Killing Fields" which documents these little bits of verminicide. It's not exactly a scientific study, but I do find it somewhat interesting. I recently, however, had a visitor to my Flickr page describe one of the gorier of the photos as "horrible" and "not necessary". Since I thought that, indeed, many people may find some of the pictures rather horrible, I marked them all as "Maybe offensive", so they would not show up in the public areas on Flickr. In addition to my sense of propriety, the comments made about that photo also inspired my sense of curiosity.
That sense of curiosity, in this case, was of the statistical nature. How many people really do find these photos offensive? I didn't particularly care if my study was scientific or not, but I was curious about the general overview of the picture. So I started adding up some of the number which are provided by Flickr, and I started doing a little bit of simple arithmetic with them. This page summarizes some of the results.
Overall, I have 1012 photos on my Flickr account at the time of these statistics. Of these, 93 belong to the Killing Fields set. Approximately 90.8% of my photos are *not* shots of dead animals. Despite this, the Killing Fields photos have been views 918 times. Overall, there have been a total of 4146 views of all of my photos. Therefore, the 9.2% of my photos which are carnage of a certain degree represent some 22% of the total views.
At the time of the statistics, I had a total of 26 photosets on Flickr, but 15 of those sets had been created during a quite recent reorganization of my photos. Overall, the eleven total older photosets had been viewed 323 times. The Killing Fields set received 88 of those views, or 27.2%. Later in the evening of my impromptu survey, I noticed that only one of my newer sets had been viewed at all, and it was only viewed once, but during that same half day, the Killing Fields set had been viewed an additional two times. None of my other older sets had been viewed again during that same period of time.
So, the final results tell me that the Killing Fields set and its constituent photos represent approximately 9% of my total "viewing area" on Flickr, yet it represents 22.5% of the total views of my Flickr account. Why?
My wife's hypothesis, which seems pretty good to me, is that it's kind of like when people are driving past an accident scene. It seems that a very strong part of human nature makes you want to slow down and gawk at the scene. Maybe it's that, or maybe it's some other reason. If you know, or if you have a reason why you might have looked, let me know, please.
Oh, and finally, the set itself is located here. Please do not look at it if you are squeamish, and especially don't go and look at it and then tell me how awful it is. Thanks.
Created on ... February 27, 2006
Last Updated March 2, 2006