“Courage is being scared to death … and saddling up anyway.”
—John Wayne

What do I think? I think having to watch a commercial before being able to watch a commercial is flat-out overkill.

Can the books come out and play?

In case you missed yesterday’s New York Times, here’s a link to Bill Keller’s excellent column about SOPA and copyright. You may get a log in prompt when you hit that link; sorry about that. Here’s a link to an edited version of the column from the Jakarta Globe. (You’d think it would be easier to find a link to a complete version of something called “Steal This Column.”) Anyway, it’s well worth finding and reading. In the column, Keller  heartily recommends Robert Levine’s 2011 book, Free Ride. The “save for later” portion of my Amazon shopping cart just got one book larger.

Since I posted about Pinterest the other day, I’ve spent some time playing with my Pinterest account.

Not only did I find the time to go into my account and figure out how to create boards, add pins and upload pins, I now have seven boards and am starting to understand the Pinterest obsession.

I’m also starting to understand some of the marketing and communications implications beyond “hey, I’m gonna point to something I like.”

Visit Bucks County is the first entity on Pinterest I’ve come across that seems to be doing it right. They have separate boards (think bulletin boards where you can post images of cool stuff) for “Dine in Bucks County,” “Stay in Bucks County,” “Shop in Bucks County,” “Say ‘I Do’ in Bucks County” and more. The trick, of course, is not to just create the board and let it sit (though search will give you some traffic, I assume), but to keep adding content on an ongoing basis.

I’m sorta surprised Zappo’s doesn’t have a presence on Pinterest (they’re great at social media and they’re all about shopping, which is a huge part of what Pinterest is about), but I guess it’s pretty early in the game for companies to be all over the platform. I have no doubt they’ll be crawling all over it before too much longer.

Al Hirt.

I have a Pinterest account. I got it because someone I know offered me an invite and I like to check out new online networks and tools, especially if they seems to be gaining some traction.

Almost immediately, I started getting a lot of emails with the subject line: “[name] is following you on Pinterest.” Holy mackeral! I haven’t done a damn thing with Pinterest, I still haven’t spent the time to go into my account and figure out how to create boards, add pins and upload pins … but those emails keep coming.

Wow. That’s some hardcore traction. So I’m not surprised when Mashable reports that Pinterest has become a top traffic driver for retailers. (They also recently listed 21 Pinterest users you must follow.)

I see some interesting potential for the platform, too. For example, one of the drawbacks of online news reading (vs. reading a printed newspaper) is the loss of serendipity. When reading a paper, you turn the page and don’t know what story you’re going to see. You might go right past it, but you might find something you never expected and read it, only to learn something you never expected to find. Online, that serendipity is lost: People generally click to read exactly what they want to read and nothing else.

On Pinterest, you can click into the “Film, Music & Books” section and stumble upon (phrase used purposefully: Pinterest is like StumbleUpon on steroids) all sorts of interesting things. Imagine Pinterest categories for local, regional or national news. Imagine a local paper having a Pinterest page on their site that helps people discover new things near where they live.

I think I need to find the time to go into my account and figure out how to create boards, add pins and upload pins.

Takeaway for marketers: You need to, too.

“Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer.”
—William S. Burroughs

Facebook’s coming IPO is all the rage in the news at the moment. Some links you might find worth clicking:

The L.A. Times takes a look at the IPO by the numbers.

Forbes calls it a “watershed moment.”

C|NET details the “top 10 surprises” about the IPO.

The Christian Science Monitor explains why this is a good thing for Groupon, Pandora, Zynga and others.

The Wall Street Journal looks at who’ll be getting rich on the deal.

The Week looks at the question we all have: Should we buy? (The answer: probably not.)

The Guardian notes that those pesky Winkelvii will cash in big-time. Maybe this will finally shut them up.

Let’s take a few minutes and remember how great Gilda Radner was. In this instance, as Roseanne Rosannadanna. (Sorry for the preroll ad.)