January 14, 2012
Pinteresting?
image from Pinterest
I am a visual person. I need to see things and compare them to each other. I have started LPOD, the Moon-Wiki and the LPOD Photo Gallery to explore ways to make lunar information more readily useful for me, and if it serves others that is great. I would like to collect different types of images together to easily select and compare - and so far the three lunar websites don't allow that. So here is another approach with a new social networking service called Pinterest. The "Pin" part is an analogy to pinning pictures up on a bulletin board - a quick and easy way to arrange things. And "interest" means that you select things to pin that interest you. Apparently Pinterest is widely used like a scrapbook to collect together and share images of things of interest. I immediately thought of two ways it could help with lunar images. First, as illustrated here, each folder can be a visual index of one month of LPODs. Often when I am looking for a previous image I find the existing monthly indexes are too small. This sample December 2011 index can be viewed at any size, so at this reduced scale you can see the whole month and when an image of interest is identified it can be easily enlarge. Clicking on the image shows it a larger size and clicking twice takes you to the webpage where the image came from. The cool thing is that when you find an interesting image anywhere on the web you click a 'Pin-it" button on your browser task bar and then the image. You can add images to any Pinterest folder that you define. In addition to the December 2011 one I created a Copernicus folderand quickly pinned in to it 22 images from LPOD and the LPOD Photo Gallery. This makes it very easy to compare images of how it looks in different illuminations - and to see which image is best. I can see having folders for many different craters of interest - just as we do in the Moon Wiki and the Photo Gallery - but here a collection can be compiled much easier.vYou have to join Pinterest to add images and supposedly it takes quite a while if you apply to be a member, but if you tell me you are interested I can invite you and you become a member immediately. Once you are a member I can add you as a contributor to the Copernicus or any other folder - called a board. if You have your own lunar board and post a Copernicus image I can 're-pin-it" to my Copernicus folder so that the collection can grow, and become more useful. It will be fun to play with this for a while to see if it is worth establishing additional lunar collections - remember this is a place to collect images that are already online, so it is aggregator software (and hopefully not aggravator software). What do you think of it?
Chuck Wood
Yesterday's LPOD: Hidden Emperor
Tomorrow's LPOD: And On Your Left
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