How many pine cones does it take to make something pinteresting?

I believe that Pinterest will be the runaway BeDazzler of the decade, since you can simply gather your already shiny objects into your own personal virtual space, rather than having to manually add sparkle to every item you own, one be-dazzling little rhinestone at a time.

R. Patts.  The other BeDazzler.

Way back in mid-April, I attempted to join Pinterest.  It did not initially go well, as I was informed that I would receive an invite just as soon as they could get around to it.  To be fair, it only took a day or so, but that is a lifetime when you have a daily blog to write.  I had to settle for making incredibly delicious Peanut Butter Bars that night instead – oh, the hardship!

So, in a nice game of proverbial tit for tat, seeing as how they couldn’t be bothered to let me join Pinterest right away, I had been neglecting them ever since, because that showed exactly, well, no one…?  Okay, to be fair, I just hadn’t had the chance to revisit the site, although I had curiously received notifications that people had started to follow me on it.  How interesting my boards of nothingness must have seemed to them.  Perhaps I should have updated my profile in there to explain that I was all about pursuing ultra-modern-minimalism, approaching zero.  Because then I could claim to be an overachiever, just to mess with their minds.  Is that wrong?

Where’s Waldo?

Anywho, here’s the deal with Pinterest:  as far as I can tell, it has two major talents.

First of all, it’s like an on-line dating service for attracting internet objects that are especially shiny to you.  So, you start by giving it some indication of what tickles your fancy.  It then goes out and finds people with boards that seem to jive the most with what you favour.  Similar to Twitter, you are then mysteriously following those individuals, and their pins appear on your home page, which you can then re-pin, much like the re-tweet.  If you link your account to your Facebook, it then further sets you up to follow your friends, which is, I suspect, how I gathered my most recent (no doubt unintentional) followers.

The second significant draw for Pinterest is its ability to collect as you go, as it thoughtfully provides you with a Pin It button on your toolbar in your internet browser of choice.  You can then capture and categorize all the random photos and stories into your own virtual scrapbook, complete with layouts that you can arrange, and witty remarks that you can add to keep your followers suitably entertained.

There’s no place like Home… on Pinterest.

For the real shiny object folks in the crowd, it can further act as a tool to try and train yourself to stay more focused, since it allows you to mark items that caught your eye while you were researching something else, for you to follow-up later when you have a little more time for such pleasant distractions.

Finally, word on the street has it that Pinterest’s database consists largely of f-words like forward fashion, food fetishes, and our furry friends, and it is growing much faster than Facebook and Twitter put together.  Who would have thunk it?

So, what’s in your tickle trunk?

Personally, I’ve added quite an array of contrasting characters to one of my boards, since they are all people who inspire me in very different ways.  I’ve also started a ‘gotta make this someday’ type of recipe board, which will undoubtedly have a cheese-specific sub-text.  For instance, it only contains one pin so far, which happens to be for a salted caramel cheesecake.  Who am I to fight the laws of attraction?  Happy pinning!