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.
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