Like quite a few friends, I’ve been grabbed by the Pinterest bug.  I won’t say I spend hours on there, but I can see how easily I could get sucked in.  Like the old days of internet surfing, it’s easy to follow one bit of eye candy to the next and before long, an hour has passed and little has been achieved!

 

 

We’re currently planning our summer road trip and South Dakota will feature, so I was amused to find the SD Pinterest board.  In fact, I was impressed by the fully featured website for the state which made planning our visit really easy!  I repinned a couple of the photos to my own Pinterest board and moved right along. As I did,  I muttered something about it to the Chief Road Trip Planner sitting beside me, which prompted him to look up quizzically and ask “What?  Pinterest?  What’s that then?”

Question #1: Is Pinterest a woman thing?

 

 

Generally speaking, I use my Pinterest board as a repository for things I might otherwise lose track of, as inspiration for a project or to store one or two ideas and thoughts.  It’s a great way of storing all these visual prompts and I would say that it fulfils the same purpose as my bookmarks did – before it was quicker to google everything!

 

 

So, here we are in February and I notice that my blog has suddenly rather a lot of referrals from Pinterest.  That provokes a little curiosity so I dig around in my stats and find the picture above was pinned by someone onto their Valentine page.  Fine with me – no problem.  I posted a tutorial on how to make the little cards last year and since it’s hardly rocket science, I wasn’t really giving much away.  But once again, the word “pinterest” was on my mind, even if it was for a slightly different reason this time.

Today, however, I am reaching the conclusion that Pinterest must have reached a critical mass.  Firstly, I come across this article which raises all kinds of very pertinent points about ownership of images, ideas and material and certainly offers food for thought regarding what I share and how I protect my photographs and ideas.

Question #2: Have you given any thought to potential copyright issues?  Will it change how readily you share ideas and post photographs of your work?

No sooner had I read this, than I came across someone else asking herself this very same question.  Amy has written a blog post about how she is thinking carefully about to protect her work too.  Well worth a read, as are the posts immediately preceding that one.

And then, as if to hit the message firmly home, I opened the “Social Media” section of Zite as I was reading my ipad and what headline was there, staring me in the face? 

How to Market your Consumer Based Business on Pinterest.

Which brings me to my final question #3:  How much longer will it be before Pinterest is overrun by commercial sites and marketing men?

I haven’t even begun to think about this aspect yet.

Oh my.