My thoughts about Pinterest.

Let me start off by say I L.O.V.E. me some Pinterest, and when joining last June, not even knowing what it was, I never imagined I would enjoy it so much.  The things I have learned from that site are amazing, and the (little traffic) my blog gets, Pinterest is a huge source of that.

There has been a lot of controversy around the legality of the site, and many people are angry about their images being posted.  This is the article that I first read about the situation, and then continued to investigate from there.  I would never want to get into legal trouble for anything I am doing online.

There are also many questions around Pinterest's Terms of Use.  I was starting to contemplate (gasp) deleting my account, but then read a follow up article on the same blog, found here and I am feeling more confident in my decision to keep my account.  This blogger actually spoke with the founder Ben Silbermann, and got some reassurance that she needed to keep her own account.  Pinterest also wrote a blog post 2/20 reassuring it users.

There are a few things I am going to do over the weekend and I would encourage others to do as well....

1.  I am going to go through my pins and delete anything that is no linked back to the ORIGINAL source.  I have gone through some pins and it goes to a site that isn't the original pin, but a pin of a pin (if that makes any sense.)

2.  This seems to be mostly and issue with photographers getting angry that copyrighted material has been pinned, so those are going to be deleted (I don't have many of those to begin with)

3.  I am going to stop doing my Pinspirational Friday, because I have seen that someone had pinned from my blog a pin that I had used and not my actual photo.

This is going to be a VERY long process and it is going to be very tedious as I am going to be making sure all my pins are legit.  But I will feel much better about it in the future.

Speaking of the future, I think that from now on I am only going to re-pin if I have checked the link back first.  Sometimes I don't have the time to do this (or am on my phone where it is an annoyance), so for that situation I will like the pin, and then re-pin once I check the link.

As for my photos, as long as they are linked back to me pin away!  It is great exposure, and a wonderful way to share ideas.  

Oh and you can follow all my boards HERE!

I am by no means qualified to give any actual advice about this subject, they are just opinions I have, and nothing more!