God bless Web 2.0 for giving us the technology to share our passion easily with the rest of the world.

Some of you, even my friends, don’t know that I am passionate about photography ever since high school. At that time, I won the photography class award for creating a portrait photo composition of my brother, using a darkroom technique of combining two negatives to create transparency effect in the composite photo (anybody know what that technique is called?). The winning photo was also featured as a Photo of the Day on PhotoPoint.com in October 6 2001. However, I lost that precious photo when that site went out of business on December 2001. I still hope of finding that photo stashed somewhere, someday.

Anyways, fast forward to 2007, my interest in photography is still on and that’s why I hang out at Flickr almost daily. I don’t take photos anymore, but I enjoy browsing interesting photos. Coincidently, “interestingness” is the exact term Flickr uses to describe a regularly updated patch of the most “beautiful, amazing, moving and striking” new photos on Flickr.

Here is where Web 2.0 comes into play:

I needed a way to get those photos delivered to me as soon as there is a new patch. Naturally, I was looking for an RSS feed for only the interesting photos on Flickr. While that wasn’t available on Flickr website, a simple search in Google returned a result of some guy who posted this very exact RSS feed. Here is the address:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/InterestingFlickr

Alaeddin's Flickr FavoritesSo I subscribed to this feed and I usually receive 100+ new photos a day in my Google Reader. Granted, not all of them are interesting to me. However, there are usually 5-10 photos a day that simply stand out as plain gorgeous and amazing. I usually add those ones to my Flickr favorites collection, and I’ve been doing that for the past couple of months.

Now here is the punch line: if you like what you see, then you can too subscribe to my favorite photos stream using this RSS feed:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/AlaeddinFavPhotos

Think of this collection as the combined goodness of Flickr’s finest photos, excluding the almost-pornographical ones that might get you fired at work. I promise to keep this stream of photos consistently fresh and interesting.
How to get your own favorite photos feed:

  1. Get Firefox browser.
  2. Install Greasemonkey extension.
  3. Install Flickr user favorites feed script.
  4. Find and share your favorites RSS feed link in your Flickr favorites page.