I’ve been using Pinterest for a several months now. Like everyone, I approach new fad sites with an “ok, what can this do for me” sort of attitude. I have to say, I LOVE Pinterest.
Pinterest is like having a bunch of virtual cork boards where you can pin ideas and share what you find. It’s a combination of saving favorites or bookmarks plus the visual element of an image that you choose for each bookmark. This way, while perusing the web you can stumble upon a blog or museum site or wikimedia page (a great source for period portraiture!) and add it to your board. You do these additions via a “bookmarklet” or “button” in your browser that sits in your bookmarks up top, on the page you want to add you just click your little bookmarklet, it asks you which board you want to add to, and you add it. You also get to add a description of the item you’re pinning. I highly recommend being the amateur historian you most probably are and putting a good note on what it is you’re looking at. Other people will appreciate, and be able to search for it better.
But that’s not all! Since you can browse categories, you can just wander through the “history” or “DIY and crafts” or “food” or whatever else strikes your fancy and see what other people have pinned recently. I find so many interesting things that way, both period and modern.
And there’s more! You can collaborate on a board. boards like the SCA Board C&I are a way for multiple people to share calligraphy and illumination links and images among a group of people.
There’s also the social feature of being able to see who pinned something, and following the link to view the board that person pinned it on. You can then “follow” the whole board and on your front page you will see any new posts that are added to it, so you can like/repin them on your own boards if they interest you. You can follow people and see everything that they pin on all their boards.
The most recent thing I found was while searching, I searched for all boards that had “SCA” in the name. ooOOOOOOoooo. Dangerous! It gave me a way to browse through all sorts of things pinned by other SCAdians. Naming your SCA-related boards to have SCA somewhere in the title basically creates a “group” of boards on pinterest that any other history buff/scadian/rennie can find and peruse using the search for board name feature.
Because you can have more than one board (I have many), you can separate out your various items into virtual “subcategories”. For my history related boards I have:
- SCA Period & Periodish (Rennie) Fashion
- SCA Early Elizabethan Fashion (this is research specifically for my persona costuming)
- SCA Decoration & Camping
I also have a lot of non-SCA related boards on food, fiber arts, other fashion, general history, knotwork, etc. I’m sure I’ll create more specific SCA boards in the future for specific projects/areas of study.
Now not everything about pinterest is awesome. For example, when you start out, pinterest automatically “Follows” people it thinks you’ll like based on some choices you make. I find this most annoying. I’d rather start out clean and figure out who I want to follow by myself, thanks. If this annoys you too, you can “unfollow” a person pretty easily.
- click on the name of the user below a pin on your front/following page.
- click the button that says “follow” or “unfollow all” (it changes title) until it is red and says “Follow All”. When it says follow all, you know you’re not following anything by that person.
- go back to your front/following page (pinterest.com), and that person’s pins should be gone. Repeat to remove others.
So, in conclusion, Pinterest is a super thumbs up, especially nice for gathering information around the web that includes visual information like portraiture, patterns, photographs, etc.