Attribution and attrition on Pinterest

So I'm on Pinterest, and I am fascinated by it. Watching how people curate things is an ever-living lesson in human behavior. Here my general impressions so far:

1. The bookmarklet that lets you "pin" whatever image you want on a Web page is wonderful for getting people to slap things up on Pinterest the minute they see them. Kudos to in-browser ubiquity!

2. That bookmarklet is hell on someone trying to find a primary source for an idea. This is because a lot of tumblrs, lifestyle blogs and picture-heavy sites are curators first, original content creators second* and they have no problems republishing photos. When Pinterest participants hit a blog and like what they see, they just click the bookmarklet. Subsequently, the Tumblr that's reproduced a photo is getting referenced in someone's pinned entry, as opposed to the original source.

Here's an example from my Pinterest board. I saw this pin of a Christmas candy cane bouquet and liked it. I wanted to know how to make it, so I went to the cited source in the pin. It's a Tumblr that had lifted the picture from another Tumblr blog, and that one had lifted the picture from the how-to entry on Ecopolitan Bride. It took me, what, three links to get to the original source of the content?

I'm touchy about primary sources right now because I just finished crunching through the O'Reilly Radar's "Strata Week: The mortality rate of URLs," with its sobering statistic that approximately 50% of 1997's URLs are dead today.

Link rot is a very real problem for the Web. It pokes holes in the contextural, curatorial nets we weave via our surfing. Link rot is going to make blogs less of a repository for information and more of a series of flat, decontextualized text files. It is going to alter information landscapes. It will make research more difficult.

We already deal with link rot in our bookmark files. How many times have you saved something to your bookmark file, found the specific bookmark months or years later, then clicked, only to find a 404?

As a visual way to organize your bookmarks, Pinterest is great. I have entire folders in my bookmarks file I plan on revisiting and pinning; for some types of content, seeing the item explains better why you saved it than whatever's in the page title.

As a way to get people to port more of their desktop data to the cloud, Pinterest is brilliant. Imagine the data mining Pinterest could do. Users tend to stick to the suggested "boards" Pinterest has set up, and all of them -- "Products I Love," "My Style Pinboard," "Favorite Places and Spaces," "Books Worth Reading," "For the Home," Eats" -- can be mapped to very lucrative consumer sectors. Imagine being able to sell a retailer information on which products of theirs resonate with specific demographics! Pinterest will be able to do that. What about working with a media company to track how many of their features get referenced in a given time period? The metrics will be there.

The question will be: How good is the information? Few users are going to bother drilling back to an original source. I don't do it 100%. I trust that some curators -- Apartment Therapy or Design Sponge, for example -- are "responsible" Web citizens who keep their site organized and published. That trust is largely unfounded.

But what Pinterest tells me overall: People love using the cloud as a way to sort and share data that is meaningful to them. They don't care about data hygiene or who's profiting. There isn't a good reason to yet. In a way, it's almost like 1997 all over again.

 

* I'm aware that one can argue that the specific curation of a collection is, in and of itself, a form of content. I agree. But that's not relevant here.

Comments

[Michelle]

I've been pondering the same issues and I was actually discussing this with Mark last night. I agree on all points. It will be interesting to see what happens next.

[Mary-Lynn]

I'm still waiting on my Pintrest invite, but just reading about this and having had similar thoughts about Tumblr, it seems similar to other problems in the publishing/library world. I wonder if this really isn't a job for the DOI (Digital Object Identifier)? They're super common now in publishing for identifying articles, but really there's no reason that any digital object (photo, paragraph of text, video file, etc.) couldn't just have an ID assigned to it (by whomever creates it, in effect making each of us publishers with a publisher prefix) which is then always attached to it (now... how? No idea but surely it could be embedded somehow?) and DOI resolvers could point back to the original source/owner.

[Grainger]

Keeping track of the sources of stuff is so Twentieth Century. We're all about Remix Culture now, we don't care about who made stuff because you can't own an idea and really everything's just an idea right?

(Or, at least, that seems to be the prevailing attitude these days.)

[Judy]

I have the google image search app installed on my computer so I can right click on a photo and see who has possibly used it on the web. It still takes detective work, but in almost all cases I can find the original source. I have a Tumblr Blog and I have a page titled: Dear Bloggers: Tumblr and Pinterest are NOT Sources. I use Pinterest and also find that a lot of the images are used over and over again, although I do find it a useful tool.

[Ivy]

When I pin something, I always go to the original source before pinning, as the reason I'm pinning something is because I want the recipe, or the tutorial, etc., usually. Then, if someone wants to repin, they'll go straight to the tutorial. I've noticed that some people pin the main URL of a blog and pin a photo in a specific blog entry. So, then I have to search through the whole blog looking for that one photo. I always make sure I'm on the actual blog post itself before pinning. So others don't have to dig.