Pinterest for men?

What's the point here or Pinterest behind this latest form of social networking and is it for men? I'm a social network geek and find it's just a part of life these days, people want or feel they need to stay connected with others. That being said, I had wondered what all of those little boxes I saw scrolling across my wife's monitor really meant.

Her Pinterest had peeked my interest enough and I decided I would give it a closer look. There was something very familiar at the start, but I wasn't quite sure.

My first look into Pinterest came from the Pinspiration App I downloaded on my Windows Phone 7 device. I quickly found out I could see all kinds of stuff, but I would need to actually get invited in, if I wanted to contribute with the masses.

Surprisingly, it didn't take as long as it does to get into some of Google programs and if you happen to know someone that uses Pinterest, then I'm sure you can get invited by them even faster if you like.

Once you've been invited, its pretty simple to select from a few things you find interesting to follow and they'll even give you some suggestions of people using Pinterest to follow and help hook you up with those in your existing social networks like Facebook and Twitter even.

Now its time for you to start pining up some things on your social cork board, so your followers may see what interests you. These interest boards allow you to group things into categories of interest from your real life and place them into a virtual space to share with others.

How you might ask? From web sites to start with and the handy Pin It button they suggest you add to your Favorites Bar. When you visit something on the web that speaks to you enough and want to keep track of it, simply Pin It and place it in one of your Pinterest Boards. It will launch the small window and hopefully find the image on the page you would like to share. You might even find a number of sites have integrated a Pinterest button within their site for you as well.

Smart phone apps is another way and this allows you to create from your very own images taken while your out and about. Its always nice to use your own photos, while out and about for sharing your interests with others.

Is it for men? Well, I can clearly say the demographics appear to be heavily slanted towards a female user base. It does seem to really speak to a person that wants to organize certain aspects of their life on a visual basis. It is very popular with Brides for example and allows them to carry an extreme amount of visual aids, right at their finger tips or add to these wedding planning Pinterests for example.

If you scroll through the Everything section on Pinterest to start with, you'll find an enormous amount of fashion pinned, along with food & drink or home decor stuff for example. Pretty much things that interest women for the most part... nice things to look at for sure, but most of it will not speak to a guy really. I would say you would be hard pressed to find around 5 percent of the pins on the front page appeal to a man.

So what's the point then? Well in a lot of ways its just a visual book marking or collection of favorites of sites and things you like and a means to share these things with others. Twitter is for posting small bits of things your interested in text or sharing perhaps a quick photo, but not a means to organize them. Facebook is similar but it does a lot more than Twitter does. So Pinterest is like a virtual scrapbook & clippings of things you like, but on more of a social level.

Some guys use it, but it's a small number of us I'd say and I'm almost willing to bet, a large number of men sign up and simply lurk and never pin things really. This brings me back to my thought at the start, I'd seen this somewhere before and it was from a site called ImgSpark that lets you create Mood Boards, only two of them and it limits you to only a gig of space.

Sometime back in 2009 is when ImgSpark.Com was created and I had joined their site back around May of 2010. This was only a couple months after the launch of Pinterest. It's only recently now that I've discovered Pinterest.

I think Pinterest clearly does things that ImgSpark is not capable of and it has a much larger user base. Is it for men though? Well, its not like they keep us from using it. It's just really up to the man in the end and if he has any real Pinterest in sharing I suppose.

Family Dinner time

Our family dinner time is headed for real change here in 2012, as we look to try something different for a change. For starters, we are going to try and not eat out and instead prepare our meals at home together as a family more.

In doing this we are going to prepare only one meal that the whole family will eat and enjoy together. We will also plan these meals out in advance for the next two weeks and stick with it. That means no more sitting around and asking, "What do we want to have for dinner tonight?" and it also means we will not make something different for just the kids and us to eat.

When I was younger and it came time for dinner, I was called to the table and we ate what ever was made for the night. There was no pre-planning as far as I knew it and I found out what we were eating as soon as I sat down with the family. Surprise, you get what you get and you don't throw any fits in the end.

Truth is I never had any problems with this really and I wasn't too picky of an eater growing up. So getting my kids to understand that they have to try new things and eat better will be an experience perhaps, but I think we'll do fine and they seem to be receptive so far to this new idea.

To start things off we've themed our dinners and set something different for each day of the week. We've went ahead and decided to keep the same day themes for both of the weeks to help make it simple too.

The girls seem to like the idea of themed meals and are planning to locate music that ties in with each nights dinner theme. I think it should be a lot of fun for all of us. Good food, cool music, and great family time for the evening.

The creation of Sunday Specials should be very interesting and we've decided to select places from around the World. We dropped Six countries into a hat to start with and South African & Brazilian have been selected as our first two Sunday Specials themed dinners. I think these might be the hardest ones to come up with out of the six, but we'll rise up to the challenge.

Hopefully this will also help us get organized a bit where meals come in to play and help us save some money with the buying of our food in advance by eating at home. This should also bring us together more and I think we'll enjoy our meals as a family and perhaps learn about some new places and foods as well.