See those 4 smaller item images at the top of the Etsy home page - the ones to the right of the text Buy & Sell All Things Handmade? Those are called Knock-outs (read below for Jared’s blurb) and now link to their corresponding listings. A bot usually pulls the images from current/new listings. Seems like the bot has been out of commission but Jared says it’ll be back up later today.

EDIT:
What is a Knock-out and how are they selected?

jared says:
I call these the ‘knockouts’. Knockouts (as I define them) are as Stella described, listing photographs where the item is floating in pure white space.

These images are periodically searched for by a robot with harry potter spectacles and algorithms for brains. The robot looks for precisely three things in the first image of recently listed items:
1) the background must be absolute pure white (#FFFFFF)
2) no cropping of the item or it’s shadow
3) no graphic design overlay (watermarks, typography, etc.)

Once discovered, knockouts displayed are randomly with each page load. The images also rotate automatically about every 2 minutes (no need to refresh to see new knockouts).

EDIT:
Bot is all better now! Jared also explains a little more about how the bot operates:

jared says:
Ok the knockouts have been udpated! (you’ll need to clear your cache to see them)

The knockout bot starts at the most recently listed item and goes back from there. It stops after the first 50 are found. So really, the knockouts are only representative of a very brief period of time, usually just an hour of the day.

Yes, it’s not fair. It’s lucky. I wish we could display every single knockout item on Etsy, but it’s currently limited to around 50 for technical reasons.
Posted at 1:44 pm, May 31 2007 EST