My daughter called me yesterday to tell me about a new site on the Internet that “I HAD TO SEE!” Now, I love my kids, but the Internet is moving faster than I can really wrap my head around. I have more emails from the nice people at Groupon and WagJag than I do from my friends.
That being said, I like to be up to date on what is going on in the world and I do appreciate that my daughter doesn’t think of me as some old fuddy duddy who is still playing her 45’s on the record player in the basement. So, I took the bait.
“What is it this time?” I asked. She told me it was called Pinterest and I had to check it out. My first stop was (and usually is) Wikipedia. According to the gods at Wikipedia, “Pinterest is a pinboard-styled social photo sharing website”. Gotta say, that after reading that definition, I was no better off. Regardless, I accepted my daughter’s invitation (you have to be invited to this site) and I got started.
After setting up my profile (it was easy), I started checking out people’s boards. It was visual eye-candy. One photo to highlight something that another person thought was interesting. “Hmmm, I could bake that” I thought. “Ooooh, that is a cool idea”.
Within minutes, I had created a few boards of my own. Places I would like to go…Things to do with the grandkids…Things to help organize my house. I kept checking out other people’s pins and repining them to my site. I wasn’t sure what I was doing at first, but I liked it.
Before I knew it, there were people following my pins. I still don’t understand how they found me, but I was fascinated that others wanted to share what I thought was cool. I pinned two of my blogs and they were repined within minutes. 
We live in a world where everyone wants to share what they know. Everyone seems to be blogging, posting on Facebook and now sharing their interests on Pinterest. When I was young, being published was a massive accomplishment. It meant that someone felt that what you wrote was worth being read. The Internet has changed all of that. Pinterest is just the latest place where we can share what we care about. I have to say, it is a little addictive.
An hour and a half later, my husband called down asking if I was ever coming to bed. “In ten minutes”, I replied. A half and hour later, I pulled myself away from the computer and headed upstairs. I was a bit bleary-eyed, but I had 8 boards set up with 102 pins attached to them. My daughter would be proud!
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