Flickr has a feature called "interestingness" (sounds like a word Stephen Colbert invented) which is an algorithm which sorts pictures based on how interesting it is. You can glean a bit about how it works if you can penetrate the haze of legalese that's in the patent application for the algorithm.
The picture at the top is the "most interesting" (as of Feb 15 2008 as determined by Flickr) of my friend Megan's photos, whose gallery is pretty awesome. My own top photo isn't as dramatic and is rather dorky, so I put hers instead (with her permission).
Whenever you search Flickr for pictures, you can rank them by interestingness. There's also a creative commons search which allows you to find pictures you can create derivitive works from. These combined features make Flickr a valuable resource for browsing and creating pictures.
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