More Time Wasters on the Internet

I'll tell ya, there are more ways than you can shake a stick at to waste time on the Internet. I found a new one today. It's called Pinterest....and if any of the people who read this journal are involved, maybe you can help me understand it.

I found it because Kwizgiver, whose blog I read -- I get the best memes from her -- wrote about it in her "Saturday 9" meme. The question was "What's the best new web site you've found" and then "the worst." I don't generally do a lot of web surfing. I pretty much stick to all of my usual sites, and sometimes if someone has linked to something interesting, I'll check it out.

I couldn't figure out what "Pinterest" was. Was it "Pin - terest?" or "Pint - erest?" or "Pinter est" (what is a pinter? and how do you become the pinter-est?) No grouping of the letters made sense.

Well, what Pinterest is is a place where you keep links to photos of things you like. Technically it's called a "social catalog for things you love." Pretty simple. Straightforward. Or so it looks. They can apparently be pictures you took or pictures you found on the net (when you "pin" your picture to a "board" on your page, it copies with it the exif data, so presumably this doesn't affect copyright laws, though they might be on shaky ground here).

I looked through some of the boards and there are really some lovely collections there, under headings like "little things I love," "perfect California clothing," "cool camera bags," "Places I would like to go," "Delicious" etc. etc. You get the idea. If you can create a grouping, you can post pictures to it on Pinterest.

I liked Food Art for this picture, which I must send to Tom.

(for those who don't play the game, this is
an "Angry Birds" pizza)

I started a board called "amazing things I have seen," just so I could try to figure out if this was something that I was remotely interested in. I wasn't sure I could put a link to it, but here it is.

But the board has mega problems, I think. First of all, there is no "help" feature.

Second, you can't find anybody. Ashley is on there, I discovered, but if I search for her, I can't find her.

You can't find all the people who are interested in the same things you are. There is a search feature, but I tried a couple of search terms and got nothing, then decided to try one of their own labels, travel, and it yielded no response.

I posted to Facebook that the site had problems and got back a snippy message saying that the problem was probably me. But then I went to the discussion board and found other messages complaining about the same thing.

The message saying it was me also gave instructions for how to solve my two main problems, but when I tried those solutions, I still ended up with the same frustration.

So I don't know if I'll check in on it very often, but it was an interesting little stroll today, and I can already see that it has the potential of being addictive!

(But I just found out that every time I post something on Pinterest, it reposts to Facebook and I can't find out how to turn that function off. Until I do, I won't be posting anything else--I HATE people who flood Facebook like that!)

On the other hand, if I hadn't been mucking around on Pinterest today, I would never have found this picture of Yangshuo, which we visited when we sailed down the Li River... and I had no IDEA it looked like this from overhead!