New thing #22: Pinterest

Pinterest is the hot new social network, but when I first checked it out I thought it was dull. It looked like a site for wedding planners, fashion merchandisers and the little girls who want to be their clients one day. But one by one my friends and family joined the site and invited me to follow their pins. I tried to resist, but resistance was futile. Late one night while on the road, huddling in the middle of the bed fighting jetlag and trying not to pick up some random hotel room DNA, I succumbed. 

Some people use the pinboards to chronicle their life, the places they've been and things they love. Some use it to inspire, pinning positive thoughts, exercise routines and books they want to read. Others use it to lampoon, like the clever series of fake Mitt Romney boards. 

I use it to collect recipes.

I have always been obsessed with collecting recipes! I have dozens of cookbooks and online recipe boxes, a drawer full of recipe clippings, a stack of foodie magazines and several bookmarked celebrity-chef websites. I rarely actually get around to using any of the recipes, but I do like to have them at my fingertips. And Pinterest offers absolutely the best way to organize them. Every recipe can be categorized on boards any way you like, easily recognizable by a pretty picture, and linked directly to the recipe source. It's OCD heaven.

But now I can't stop pinning recipes. I want to collect them all! And I want you to repin them and think I'm wonderful for finding it first! In fact, I got so hooked on pinning and having stuff repinned, I started to branch out. I started experimenting with those inspirational sayings, creating them in Powerpoint and uploading them to this blog, one at a time. Then I pin them on Pinterest and see what kind of response I get. It's quite a sociological experiment. Uplifting thoughts generally get a little reaction. Snarky sayings are usually repinned immediately by a dozen or so people. But by far the biggest and most positive reaction (well over 400 people) has been to the picture I found and posted about my pinning obsession. Seems like I'm in good company.