Vacation destinations, DIY creations, meal ideas and fashion tips all conveniently located in one place – pinterest.com.
“It’s a virtual dream world,” said Deneen Gilmour, professor of mass communications.
The website was created nearly two years ago but recently exploded with popularity. Most users are 25 to 44-year-old females. When Gilmour told her male-dominated writing for the web class they would be required to incorporate Pinterest in one of their assignments, the male students looked at her as if she was speaking another language.
Since most women are in-the-know, here’s the gist of the website using an example that is stereotypically male. It’s a social networking site that allows users to organize images and ideas from around the web into different groups. Let’s say a guy is in the market for a motorcycle. He can create a “board” called “motorcycles.” While surfing through the “Cars & Motorcycles” category on Pinterest, a 2011 Harley-Davidson Nightster catches his eye. He can “pin” it onto his “board.” Friends that follow him can see his “board,” and he can see the “boards” of people he follows. Users can also “like” and comment on “pins” offering suggestions of whether or not to buy the motorcycle. Clicking on “pins” usually takes users to the original source or website where more information can be found.
The students in Gilmour’s class write about downtown Fargo-Moorhead for a blog called “Doing it Downtown.” For one of their stories, they will have to incorporate Pinterest — whether it is by writing a story about a church downtown and creating a wedding board or writing about a downtown restaurant and creating a board with similar food items or anything in between.
“Pinterest is a form of data curation,” Gilmour said. “Data curation is getting really huge and important as a skill set in multimedia journalism, and I want students to be able to do it. I chose Pinterest rather than something else because it’s popular right now.”
It may be a popular site for females, but Kevin Gutmann, a student in Gilmour’s class, is dreading incorporating Pinterest in an article.
“I’m going to just get it done with, and then I’m just going to leave Pinterest forever. I’m never coming back to Pinterest,” Gutmann said. “I just can’t find anything that grabs me as a male viewer. When you type in ‘bars,’ it came up with ‘lemon bars.’ Seriously, that threw me off.”
The majority of the male population may not have caught on yet, but the site reached nearly 5 million pinners in November 2011 making it one of the most popular networking sites. Whether it’s a passing fad or, like Facebook, the next long-lasting internet addiction is still to be determined. But for now, pin on.
BY KAYLEE OSOWSKI
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