I joined Pinterest a few weeks ago. For those of you that have been living under an internet rock, Pinterest is a social sharing site where you “pin” things you like onto a virtual pin board. I’m still not entirely sure what to do with it to be honest. I’ve been pinning random cool things I’ve found, liking other pins and I’ve even made my own pin boards… but I don’t really feel like I’m achieving anything with it. My Pinterest page is here for anyone who fancies following my pins.
Pinterest is a fantastic place to find crafting ideas, delicious recipes and fashion tips – This recipe for chili-chocolate macaroons is a particular highlight. (I’m slightly obsessed with chilli chocolate at the moment.) My main gripe with Pinterest is similar to my gripe with Tumblr – there is too much fakery! Becca from Shiny Shiny put this much better than I can in her opinion piece, ‘Is Pinterest just a beautiful but sad fantasy land?’, where she talks about the way people manicure the image of themselves obsessively online. There is also a brilliant piece on the Tumblr angle you can read on Bitchbuzz.
I often worry that more and more of my time is spent being sucked into social networks. Yet here I am, joining yet another massive website, wasting time sharing things that I haven’t created. I like to think that a lot of the things I am pinning are inspiring me to make my own items to share, it’s certainly part of the reason I started work on my knitted beetle patchwork! Maybe Pinterest will grow on me. It’s still a relatively new social network, and it has huge potential. But hey, I’ve still got Tumblr, Twitter and deviantART to fill that gap if I get bored. Any of you lot on Pinterest? What do you think of it?
Oh yes, I also joined a forum! Another way to waste time. I haven’t participated in forums since I moved from Community Management to PR just over two years ago! I’ve been taking a while to get back into it, but since the forum is about insects, I’m really enjoying it. The forum I’ve joined is BugNation.co.uk for anyone interested in insect-related topics. The only real downside of joining is that I’m now looking to get 2-3 more varieties of Leaf Bug (Phylliidae) to add to my personal zoo. Not that you can blame me, look how cute they are! This is one of my female Phyllium giganteum having a drink.
