Why Pinterest needs you

I've been spending a bit of time with Pinterest. A friend warned me of the danger of doing so: it's rather a visual vortex. One intriguing looking photo leads to a slew of others and before you know it you've pinned and followed hundreds of posts and digital cork boards and half a rainy day has disappeared.

I can't see myself idling away hours on a sunny day - Pinterest doesn't say anything; it just shows you stuff. The appeal of Pinterest is that it's all lovely stuff. Beautiful homes, perfectly styled hair and fashion, cute pets and admirably well executed home crafts. There are photos and paintings too, along with some shining examples of architecture and product design.

Pinterest began as a closed shop, open to crafters and bloggers and anyone with an established web presence who would recognise how sharing boards of beautiful things might catch on. The social sharing site is now in a loose 'invite only' mode but actually has more than 18 million users and is soon set to become mainstream. It's not quite Facebook yet, but it shares some of that site's attributes and works directly with it, as it does with Twitter.

Twitter's similar, in that it offers an instant means of sharing items you like. With Pinterest, it's about the pictures rather than clever words. Perhaps recent Facebook acquisition Instagram is a better example. Once something's 'pinned' it can be seen forever (unless you unpin it, of course) on your Pinterest board.

You can pin video as well as photos, so there's scope to pin 'funnies' and all sorts that you might previously have shared on Facebook but that disappear off your page once a few more posts appear in your Timeline. I recently berated Videojug for its not always funny funnies. Get them on Pinterest and let the world decide.

It's this sort of engagement (and that Videojug and Vimeo do within their own environs) that Pinterest desperately needs. It could be a cool place to hang out, but it's dominated by photos of wedding dresses and cute designer things for kids. It needs rescuing from its saccharine coating and to be given some balls. 'Bloke' stuff, punk stuff, not quite so comfortable to look at stuff.

Corkboards use pins for a reason, so you can jam them in with a thumb and show the world that 'this' is what's worth looking at. Duh!

Free time me time

Next week, I was supposed to be going to China. I’d have been shown the ins and outs of a number of useful new products that Hewlett Packard are keen to show those of us who cover such exciting things as printers and laptops. We’d be told about the research and development that goes into designing such useful business tools and, back in the UK, we’d eventually get to give our take on what we were shown.

Based on previous business jaunts with HP, the likelihood is that we wouldn’t be allowed to share our thoughts on what we’ve seen until a week or even a month after our return from Shanghai. I certainly wouldn’t have been spilling any secrets about the under wraps gadgetry while I was in China.

Nonetheless, my role as a ‘self-employed business advisor’ did not meet with the authorities' approval and I’ve been refused entry to the country on this occasion. I’ll have to keep my thoughts on printer technology to myself. I'd love to have spent time in such an interesting city as Shanghai, though. 

All this gives me a bit of time on my hands (not something I’m very good with – I keep myself busy at all costs). I’ve done enough work to keep me busy before I went away and when I got back, but I’ve suddenly got a full work week to fill.

My first thought was, how about doing some of the things you couldn’t have done if you were in China. 


I could get political and talk about the silent demonstration in Trafalgar Square last weekend by followers of the Falun Gong. 


I could talk about some of the services that westerners enjoy and the Chinese are denied, the latest being the Google Drive cloud-storage service. It wouldn’t achieve much and, besides, China has its own version of the internet and its own online services. Its people have far bigger issues than whether they get such generous data storage allowances with Baidu.

Instead, I thought I’d plan my unexpected ‘free’ week around things that I couldn’t do if I were in China. 

There’s no excuse not to get out on my bike or haul myself down to a local gym and start sorting out my weak back. My back has been playing me up again of late, but I never make the time to sort it out.

I can declutter the flat and finally get some sort of order in the spare room that was originally planned to be my work-at-home space. Someone else will appreciate those books, those tops and trinkets that have long gone unloved in this home. There's three more tomes beside my bed and I might just be able to read them. 

The weather’s turned and the garden is crying out for attention. It’s not too late to have a second stab at getting some vegetables to grow.

I can dig out my cameras and start properly getting to know how to take worthwhile photos without recourse to clever tech tricks. I've officially got time to knit! 

And there's a certain cake I've been challenged to bake that requires patience and not a small amount of decorating skill. 

I'm beginning to wonder whether I ever had time for Shanghai at all.