OK - so this week I found a new time wasting tool that not only do I LURVE - but it may actually prove to be extremely useful! If you haven't heard of Pinterest yet, then you may just want to keep reading.
Pinterest is like your own personal on-line scrapbook, you can make categories, store images, share your 'pins' with others and browse other peoples 'pins'. The Pinterest site describes itself like this.....
What do you see?
The category view - called 'boards' (which you make yourself - so they can be anything) looks like this. You can make as many boards as you like, they can be 'private' so only you can add items or 'public' where you allow others to add pins to your board.
The individual pins look like this, and link back to the original web page the image was found on. If you click the link next to 'From' you go to the original page - great for recipes.
How is this useful?
Well not sure about anyone else but I love saving ideas and images I find on the internet to inspire me later, I have gigabytes of saved data: photos landscapes, people, flowers, card ideas, beautiful art work, layouts, recipes, stuff to buy if I win lotto, colour combinations the list goes on..... Only problem is that it's almost impossible to remember where it came from by the time I go to use the idea, say I borrowed an amazing layout and want to credit the original creator - how do I figure out who that was - well really I can't the way I currently save things - this makes it much easier.
Pinterest (when used at it's best) allows you to 'pin' an image from the original web page, this is a double bonus - it doesn't take up YOUR space on your hard drive AND you have a permanent link to the original work making it easy to give credit where it's due - both of these things are a huge bonus for me.
Another plus is you can share your pins (or those you like) on Twitter or Facebook, so let friends (or customers) know what you're looking at, what's interesting, new etc.
Something else you might not have considered is that it's not just for pictures - you can use Pinterest to categorise and keep track of your web bookmarks, but the nice thing is that this is in visual form rather than text lists - so much nicer to look at. For example - make a category 'board' eg: Recipes - find your on-line recipe to try, 'pin' a picture from the recipe and save to your 'recipes' board, then when looking for a recipe, you look through all your yummy photos, click the link and are taken to the original site with the recipe.
So if you're interested in having a look or even getting your own Pinterest 'board' you can find Pinterest here http://pinterest.com/ you will need to sign up for an account and wait for an acceptance email.
If you're interested in following me or having a better look at how I'm using Pinterest you can find me here http://pinterest.com/sparkletart/
Have a fabulous week,
