Got one negative comment about the flickr updates, decided to interpret it as "make them more interesting" rather than actually stopping them (after all, playing with the tools is more than half of what this is about - I'm not trying to find strangers here, or anything...)
The flickr updates now include as many tags as they can, sorted by popularity and length, so the latest one says [Concord,Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge,Massachusetts,ice,sunshine,winter,marsh...] which perhaps gives the reader an idea of what pictures they'll find. (Granted, most of my readers are local, so knowing me and knowing the weather is probably sufficient to guess :-) Not realizing that python's sort is stable in 2.4 and later, I counted tags and used a key of tag_popularity[tag] - 1/float(len(tag)) (the value itself is the major key, putting everything into integer buckets, and the tag length reduces that - the shorter the tag, the more it reduces, so the closer to the start of the list of tags that length, but bounded between 1/1 and 1/longest-tag-len, approaching zero, so the values fit. Of course we want high popularity first, so this is a reverse sort, so we're actually favoring longer tags, based on them likely having more inherent detail.) This is what we call "excessively clever" - given a stable sort, we could just sort the list twice:
tags = sorted(tag_popularity, key=len)
tags = sorted(tags, key=tag_popularity.__getitem__)and then reverse the whole thing. (Notice that sort-stability is the place where sorted(reverse=True) is different from reversed(sorted()) - the former reverses the direction of the current key, but preserves the order of things that were equal; the later reverses everything.)
Future directions could include