Social Networking, Pinterest | featured news

I’m sure you’ve all seen the gaudy statistics when it comes to the gender split of Pinterest’s following – anything ranging from 72% to a staggering 97% of its user base has been reported as female.

Some of the results are predictable: yeah, we know, ladies loooove Pinterest (15.4 million more monthly female visitors!) and Reddit is inundated with sexist dudes. (74% of users are men.) But did you know that 62% of Twitter users are women? Or that a shit ton of men are still refusing to give up on Google+?

A boom in users on the social media site — and the fact that more than two-thirds are women — is attracting political messages to the site best known for recipes, crafts and I-want-that images. In political persuasion, as in marketing, "it's always the next big hot thing," says Zac Moffatt, digital director for Republican Mitt Romney's presidential campaign. "And it's kind of hot right now."

Pinterest, which allows users to share photographs, recipes and other media on custom "pinboards," raised $100 million in a funding round led by the Japanese e-commerce company Rakuten.

The site, which allows users to pin images of products they like on online scrapbooks, has seen its traffic grow almost sevenfold in five months and is ranked by one research firm as the No. 3 social network behind Facebook and Twitter.

Pinterest, the newly hot social networking site, has answered some questions about copyright permissions and how the company thinks about sharing.

Oh, you pretty things. Just look at the mama giraffe nuzzling a baby giraffe, that lovely idea for an indoor planter made of mason jars and those perfectly cooked bacon strips cooling on a plate. This is what people are circulating on Pinterest, the latest website-of-the-moment for sharing things you love....

Don’t tell anyone, but the Washington Post is paying me to hunt for photos of beautiful bedrooms and mid-century modern chairs and post them on an online bulletin board. Pinterest, the talk of social media mavens, is now part of my job as a reporter. I’m using my design eye for branding, marketing and promotion. Laugh, if you will, but in case you haven’t seen from the myraid reports, the site is totally fun and addictive.