Let’s crowd-source a Pinterest satire site

January 19th, 2012, 5 Comments »

I like online satire. The technology world takes itself pretty seriously, and deserves its fair share of skewering. When it’s done correctly, satire doesn’t have to be mean-spirited. It’s cutting, and pokes gentle fun at the ideas and projects we may be taking too seriously.

Pinterest.com has exploded onto the start-up scene. In the current parlance, it’s a “push-button curation” site. A cousin to Tumblr, you use Pinterest to collect images from the web and ‘pin’ them to ‘boards’. To me, it’s mostly Delicious for pictures or collages of “stuff I want to buy”.

It represents the convergence of a few trends. First, and most importantly, there’s the crunchy, Etsy, DIY movement that’s popularized knitting and other crafty practices, and is reflected in the hipster ethos. Add to that mix the maturation of online shopping, where a lot of people spend a lot of their time (particularly on tablets like the iPad) browsing online stores. Then bake in the mainstream understanding of social sharing, thanks mostly to sites like Facebook and Twitter.

I’ve barely used the site–I haven’t thought of a personal or professional use for it yet. I was wondering about it on Twitter and somebody (I’m afraid I’ve forgotten who) suggested that it wasn’t for me, but rather for “co-eds to make visioning boards for The Secret“. Ouch.

Is anybody Pinterested?

Pinterest is ripe for satire. And I wish I had a good idea about how to satirize it. But life is a bit hectic at the moment, and, as I said, I’m a Pinterest noob.

I suggested on Twitter that the satirical site ought to be at Disinterest.com, but that’s already taken by a mortgage company. Then Paula suggested Dishinterest.com, which sounds excellent to me. So I registered it.

Now what should go there? What are the characteristics of Pinterest that most deserve a critique? In my limited time on the site, I see a lot of these quotations-in-image-form that are popular on Tumblr (ironically, it’s become immediately popular to use this collage site to collect blocks of text). This isn’t a great idea, but maybe the site is just a board full of the most banal objects one can find: a pencil, a clump of dirt and so forth?

What do you think? Any good ideas for Pinterest-related satire?

5 Comments »

Porn for Girls, by Girls

December 13th, 2007, 2 Comments »

Wow, it’s rare that I can justify an SEO-friendly title like that. But here I refer to an entirely-safe-for-work one-page funny site called PornForGirlsByGirls.com. It’s a reasonably clever promotion for The Internet: Now in Handy Book Form!, about which I have no idea (oddly, that Amazon URL features the character string ‘thegooddrugsg-21′ in it).

The format of the page (a page that looks like a site, but has no clickable links except at the very bottom) is a bit like Get A First Life. I don’t think I started that trend–where did I steal that format from? Well, I made iCryptex first, but before that–I can’t remember, now.

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Does Anybody Else Have iPhatigue?

July 2nd, 2007, 15 Comments »

iPhatigue.comI’m sure that the iPhone is, indeed, a herald of the Second Coming, the key to the Ark of the Covenant and the missing piece of the Rosetta Stone, all rolled into one. But, you know, I feel like we’ve all obsessed over it enough, and it’s time to move on. As Life Gives You Lemons points out, (via Hugh and That Canadian Girl), there’s been precious little talk of more important news.

I was lying down for a nap this morning (I got up very early), musing on the iHue and iCry. A word came to me, out of the iEther:

iPhatigue

And so that begot iPhatigue.com, yet another one-page satire. Hopefully my obscure location on a tiny island in the Mediterranean (sans Apple Store, I hasten to add) will protect me from the iCult.

15 Comments »