noticings: the blog

Hello Little Fella

Phew. It’s been too long since we did a rule change on Noticings. But, here goes:

We’re reducing the score for lost things down to 10 points from 2x. It’s been a good rule, but it’s easy to game and we want to keep things fresh.

We’re adding a Hello Little Fella rule! For faces that you spot in objects. Just like this by tim_d:

This is inspired by Matt Jones’ Hello Little Fella Flickr group. We wanted to do the scoring based on whether you’d added your photo to the group, but it turns out that Flickr doesn’t provide that information in the API very easily. So, for now, tag your photo as ‘hellolittlefella’ to be scored appropriately.

Those changes are in play from now.

New Year, New Rule

(New Yorker Sign by Diego_3336)

The new year is nearly upon is, and so that means it’s time for a new rule. Namely: a bonus ten points for noticing new things. New anythings: new years, new friends, new Yorkers. Just make sure it’s tagged as new and that it is new. And if it’s not new - fear the wrath of the moderator.

Joking!

But: this rule only lasts for pictures taken during the first week of the New Year - Jan 1 2010 to Jan 7 2010. So keep your eyes peeled for new things. There’s a lot of them this time of year.

Happy New Year all, and happy noticing.

A Widening Pond

We’re just a little minnow of a game, but it’s always nice when we get featured by some of the bigger web-trout. Flickr wrote about us on their blog and said “yay!” a lot, whilst ReadWriteWeb described us as “a great way to keep you sane in your hometown while literally putting it on the map for its unique features”. Not that we were fishing for complements.

All that attention has bought us lots of new players - welcome! We’ve had enough of an uptick that we’re going to have to spend some time upgrading our servers to make sure things keep running smoothly. So we’ll be down for a couple of hours, sometime in the next few days.

And we’re aware the game needs some freshening up for the new year. We’ve got plans afoot for new rules and features. There has been plotting over fish finger sandwiches, notebooks have been sketched in and now code needs to be written.

Thanks for playing, and onwards!

Important rule changes

Listen up Noticers, we’ve got some rule changes!

1. We’ve got rid of 20 points for noticing something red. It seemed to be quite easy, and the results weren’t that exciting.

2. We’ve bought back double points for noticing something lost. There were loads of great lost things spotted last time we did it, and we loved looking through them. Again, tag with ‘lost’ to be scored correctly.

3. We’ve added 20 points for noticing a typo or misspelling on a sign. It’ll be intresting to see what hapens with thsi one. Tag with ‘typo’ to be scored correctly.

And the big one. From tomorrow, each player is limited to three noticings per day. We hope that’ll focus attention on picking the best stuff, not everything you see. Notice wisely.

All that is in play now.

Noticings iPhone application launched

We just launched an iPhone app! It’s designed to help you get photos from your iPhone onto Flickr, including all the metadata required for Noticings, with the minimum of hassle.

Take a look at our splash page for it, or jump straight to the App Store.

Noticing something red

I think the bonus points for noticing lost things went quite well. The last day is still to be calculated, but there were 53 things spotted, include rope, a shoe, a teddy bear, a jumper and a rubby duckie. Very good. You can see the full selection on Flickr.

So, it’s time for another challenge. This time, noticing red things. You know: things that are predominately red in colour.

This feels a bit easier than noticing lost things, so we’ve giving twenty points instead of doubling your score. Obviously we’ll adjust that if it doesn’t feel right.

And again, we’ll run this for two weeks. Happy hunting!

Update: just to clarify: tag your noticings on Flickr with ‘red’ to be scored correctly.

On Rules

One of the most interesting things about Noticings for me is that the rules are always in flux. For example, lost things are currently scoring double points, but that’ll stop on Sunday 8th November, probably to be replaced by something else.

It might be described, loosely, as a Nomic, a game in which the rules are always changing. We’re not particularly democratic about the rule changes at the moment, but we’d like to be. We want people to submit ideas for new rules, and to negotiate changes between themselves, much like we used to in the playground.

Hopefully in the future we’ll have a better way of doing this, but for now the Get Satisfaction forum is the best place for it.

For example, at the moment, I feel that players in city centres are getting too much of a bonus for noticing something near another player’s noticing. And we’ve got a few ideas of what we’re going to do about this, but we’d like your thoughts too.

Of course, there are a few house rules, to give the game some bounds and constraints.

One of those is that Noticings aren’t people. Pictures of people seemed just too complicated to deal with, with too much hidden meaning, and it just seemed safest to exclude them from play.

Another one of the house rules is that your photo has to be of something, and that something has to be visible to others. If it’s not clear in the picture, then some information in the title will help.

We’ve not always done a great job of signposting these rules, but now we’ve got a rules page, detailing these. If you think we’ve got something wrong, please let us know.

Also, now, when we remove a photo because we think it doesn’t meet the criteria, then you’ll be able to see why on your profile page.

I’ll leave you with this terrible pizza incident, by Jason Reidy:

Double points for finding lost things

We’re trying an experiment for the next couple of weeks. From Monday 26th, through to Sunday 8th, if you stumble across something that’s been lost by someone then we’ll double your score for that photo.

We’re looking for things that have obviously been lost by someone. Things like this child’s photo, spotted by Meg Pickard:

Lost cat posters don’t count, and neither does stuff that you’ve lost and then found.

The important bit: If you’ve spotted something that qualifies, tag it as ‘lost’ as well as ‘noticings’ on Flickr, and we’ll score it appropriately.

We’ve got no idea if this will work, but it’s worth a go. Looking forward to seeing what you find!

Clarifying the Machine Tags

In my excitement, I probably didn’t quite explain the machine tag bit very well. When I said add the machine tag noticings:id=x, what I meant was that x should be the ID of the photo on Flickr. If you look at the address bar, it’s the number after your name: flickr.com/photos/scraplab/3962506654/.

And if you want Flickr to pick it up, you’ll have to add it after your photos have been scored on Noticings. Which is why it’s best to do it automatically: just change the machine tag settings under ‘your account’ when you’re signed into Noticings.