Mav & I have a long standing conversation revolving around our Flickr photostreams, and the "most visited" list. Put simply, we don't understand it at all.
I'm willing to accept that weird confluences of random chance, the karma tornado, and other forces outside my control will conspire to make odd, random photos in my stream viewed more often than my personal favorites.
"cuddle-pile?"
What still has me scratching my head is why the view counts on this (handful of) images skyrocketed to over 2,100 views each, while the highest view count of any image in my "Top 10" set is just over 300? I believe just ONE of these images has more views than all of the images in my Top 10, combined! (I think that was even true before I swapped out a few of my Top 10 for Death Valley images I just uploaded)
Ok, I'll grant you, they're photos of a pile of attractive young women (and man, if you can find him) But you certainly can't tell that from the icon! And there's a fair bit of skin showing (though it's all shins & kneecaps, but again, you can't tell that from the icon either.)
But more importantly, I believe (though I have only my own anecdotal evidence to support this theory) that the "Everyone's Photos" section of one's Flickr homepage is populated by images people are uploading at that moment. If this is true, then the only explanation for these photos' consistent popularity is that people are searching for them. The titles vary greatly, so it comes down to tags. The only tag unique to these images is "cuddle-pile."
"Nude"
It has been posited (by Chiara) that this is the result of people looking for pr0n. That thought had crossed my mind, but I dismissed it, because each one of these images has an order of magnitude more views than an image in my Top 10 tagged "nude!"
I know that trying to look for rational explanations for this kind of thing is a road which leads to madness. But this is one of those times when I curse myself for giving up hosting my images myself, because I desparately want to look at the HTTP referrer logs (a path that often leads to amusing revelations!)
Shameless plug: I just posted the last set of sand dune photos at dawn in Death Valley (they start with this one, and get better once dawn breaks), and they're quite good, if I do say so myself. (All that's left to post is the second half of Sunday and the panoramas)
