viz.

I just came across this nifty new feature from blogspot called "Blogger Play." Its designers describe Blogger Play as "a real-time slideshow of photos Blogger users have recently uploaded to their blogs. It's a great snapshot of what people are thinking and posting about, right now!"

While it may not actually be as exciting as their exclamation point suggests, it's still pretty mesmerizing. Most of the photos are pretty mundane, lots of them are weird, and of course there are tons and tons of baby pictures.

One question that has come up frequently (apparently) is this: "Will Blogger Play display inappropriate images?" According to the creators of this feature, Google's safe-search algorithms (which I know nothing about--but then, I guess no one who doesn't work for Google knows much about their algorithms) to keep "inappropriate images" from showing up. But they don't guarantee this will always work, and encourage users to report violations. It is possible to pause the slideshow and click on a button for more information about the posting info. for each image.

Anyway, maybe it's just me, but I think this actually *is* really "nifty." I can imagine some interesting projects growing out of it. It's also kind of cool to think about it as a kind of random-"culture" ("culture" in the big sense) generator: imagine recording all the images for a given year, and trying to trace any patterns that might emerge over time...