Social sharing through visual images seems to be the hot thing right now, doesn’t it? After being a quiet player on the scene for a couple of years, Pinterest has completely taken off with people repinning like crazy. I was actually on Pinterest from the get go but I, too, have started using it more in the past several months because of the fact that everyone else is using it.

So have you seen that there’s a new similar site called Clipix? Now I’m not typically one for jumping on the bandwagon of the latest new social networking thing. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. In this case, I’m playing around with Clipix a bit even though it’s very similar to Pinterest.

Why? Well, there are two reasons. First of all, I’ve kept my Pinterest boards almost exclusively about crochet. I use it mostly to connect with people who know me through my crochet website, Crochet Concupiscence. I use it to share what I’ve posted on my crochet site and to find new things to post there. So I haven’t really used any of the non-crochet stuff on the site even though there’s lots of beautiful pins there.

That leaves Clipix open for me to actually Pin tons of different things. I’m playing around with that side of Pinterest, instead of focusing on crochet there, and that’s part of why I’m enjoying it so much. I’ve got boards for shoes, fashion, travel, art and beautiful things.

And I also have a board for interesting articles which brings me to the second reason that I like Clipix – you can pin links to articles instead of just pictures. It’s not the main feature of the site but it’s a feature that I really like. It gives me a different options than “bookmarks” for storing things I want to be able to come back to and I like that.

I also think that there’s a really good social aspect to Clipix, better than what Pinterest seems to be offering, but I haven’t explored it extensively yet. So, we’ll see. The jury’s still out but I’m enjoying playing for now.

Tags: clipix, images, media, pinterest, social media, social sharing, web 2.0

I almost never watch the news. I almost never read the news. And yet, I do tend to more or less know what’s going on in the world. It’s hard to avoid news completely. It comes in through posts on Twitter and headlines on blogs. So it’s not that I stay out of touch with what’s going on and what people think about it; I just rarely get that news from traditional sources.

And what I’ve seen lately about swine flu pretty much sums up why that is. The media is designed to sensationalize news and to create what amounts to a sense of panic about what’s happening in the world around us. Every time that I turn on a news program I start to worry that I’m going to get murdered or lose my home or catch the latest deadly flu that’s going around.

And while I think it’s good to know what’s happening around you, I think it’s a lot better to get that information first hand from actually experiencing what’s going on around you than to get it from the headline reports about what others say is going on.

Blogs and social networking comments seem to provide a more well-rounded, balanced picture of what’s happening with real people in the world. They say, “yeah, I’m scared of this but I’m also doing x,y,z and can’t go crazy worrying about it right now”. Perhaps that’s why I liked these ten funny videos about swine flu. They remind us to put our fears into perspective, to laugh at our lives and to socialize with those around us instead of locking ourselves up in our fears.

Tags: entertainment, fear, hubpages, media, news, pandemic, swine flu, videos