tsibley, thanks much!

kadenjack, i love the opportunity to resubmit a shot after trying to work on it given the feedback from the first time around. to me, that's one of the points of ws. i'm glad you support that :-) interestingly enough, the ratings last time around were higher:

* Relevance: 3.50
* Impact: 3.50
* Composition: 3.56
* Technique: 3.63
* Quality: 3.47
* Overall: 3.532

Ratings this time around:

* Relevance: 3.29
* Impact: 3.14
* Composition: 3.21
* Technique: 3.29
* Quality: 3.21
* Overall: 3.228

was this rated by a completely different set of people? if not, did some rate down because to them reposting an image is a no-no? did it fit the previous theme better? there's no way to answer these questions. nonetheless, i find it interesting.

I think the ratings are a crap shoot. If you get 13 of what Ana calls the speed raters, you don't have a shot at a decent rating. If you get the thoughtful ones, you should get a much more insightful idea of the merits of your image. Unfortunately you have no control over what combination of raters you'll attract. In theory that's good, but I think the exact same image posted at different times of the day could garner wildly different scores.

Perhaps if the raters had to explain their ratings we'd get a better idea. I've tried to rate and comment on every image this week, and I can tell you it's a lot of work keeping up at times, so I don't know if there's a way to force comments, but for me they're much more valuable than the numbers.

kadenjack, I suppose that could be true, but I'm of the opinion (not based on empirical data, mind you) that while the same image may get different reactions by different sets of people, the scores won't be substantively different. but, again, that's just my opinion. and i'm happy you weighed in with yours. thanks :-)