My Pinterest feed is all maps, all the time. It's like I discovered rec.arts.maps and jumped right in.
I don't try to make Pinterest a simple copy of anything else that I do online, in part because there's really nothing similar to it to copy. It's ridiculously easy to make a copy of an image and attach a few words to it, and there's not any real problem with posting too much stuff to it because when you're on topic it all just flows down the page nicely.
I've started to collect a few people on Pinterest who share my love of maps, and it's nice to see their map-collecting work in my feed there. What I miss, though, is bringing that love of maps back here - there's certainly a story behind most of those maps, and perhaps one in ten deserves a longer essay to go with it and some spot in my own permanent blog collection.
The biggest weird thing about Pinterest is how readily people make copies of copyrighted materials. It's like the rules are different there - fair use, perhaps? - and within the system no one seems to care very much if an image is copyrighted or creative commons or public domain. I'm sure that speeds up the user interface a lot, but it makes me think twice before just yanking anything from within Pinterest and placing it somewhere else without doing some research.
Here's one of the many maps that I have found that I wouldn't have collected any other way - I've done the Pinterest "embed" here, just to simplify what would otherwise be a multi-step upload and include process. The only complaint with the map is that "Wal-Mart Fans" should probably be "Trader Joes Fans".
Source: typicalmichiganders.tumblr.com via Edward on Pinterest
