What is Pinterest?

In a nutshell, Pinterest is a digital mind map that allows users to submit photos of products and places they find and like online. Once you’ve signed up and logged in, you can edit your profile to include interests and other information about yourself. Currently an invite-only service, those interested in signing up can request an invite either directly from Pinterest or from a Pinterest member. At present Pinterest is run by a seven person team, so resources are limited. However they are to refine the service before opening it up to the public.

How Pinterest is Different

Pinterest is fairly underground at the moment, but it’s attracted a lot of interest already from tech-savvy users and critics alike. Unlike other social media platforms, Pinterest gives you a number of options when it comes to discovering new content. A user can create collections of different items that they like, and other users can choose to either follow that collection or follow the likes of the person that posted them. Items posted on Pinterest can also be commented on by users, giving each collection a forum or community feel that’s lacking in Twitter.

Design and Layout

The design of Pinterest is similar to Google+ in many respects. The layout of the site strips away decorative elements and lets content speak for itself. It’s clean, simple and attractive, and is extremely fast and responsive in everyday usage. Every image post supports comment threads which you can expand by clicking on its tab. Likewise, the manner in which Pinterest is designed makes planning for events or compiling shopping lists easy and intuitive. Basically, Pinterest is a digital cork board that can be rearranged by using the built-in search capabilities to bring up new images.

Final Thoughts

Pinterest is a highly visual way of allowing users to find things that interest them in the quickest manner possible. These days, the web is moving away from search and opting for discovery instead. Thus, expect services like Pinterest to garner more interest from casual web surfers as they learn what such visual discovery tools can bring to the table. While Pinterest attracted an overwhelmingly female following at the outset, it’s catching on with techies and other demographics as well thanks to its innovative concept and design. You’ll no doubt be hearing more about Pinterest in the coming months.

p.s. Follow us on Pinterest

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What’s Interesting with Pinterest? originally appeared on: Crenk
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File Type

File type can be a subjective matter. Site speed has become one of the many ranking factors in the Google algorithm. As such, the larger file types should be avoided. Gifs will offer you a small file size but at reduced quality. They are perfect for background images, gradients, shadows, etc. However, for larger images such as logos and images that accompany the main content they are not ideal, in these cases a jpeg is the better option. If your designer is a little fussy then he or she may want images to be in PNG format to support vector images. Compromise is the key in this instance.

Image Size

Once again, with site speed being one of the many ranking factors, image size can play a huge part in reducing your websites load times. Avoid using unnecessarily large pictures and use the appropriate file type for the images. Using the ‘Save For Web’ feature in Photoshop can also help toward reducing file size. From a user experience perspective, unnecessarily large images may contribute to a bad user experience. If a larger image is needed, consider linking from a smaller image or employing a JavaScript / jQuery light box plugin.

Image Location

Avoid placing images in the root folder of your site. It’s always appropriate to have a folder called ‘images’ in the root of your website and to locate all of your images there. You may also find it useful to have category folders within the image folder for organisational means. Avoid saving your images to an eternal location, this will increase the load time for your site.

Image Naming

It is good practice to name your images appropriately. You can use your targeted keywords to name images to give an accurate reference to what’s in the image. Avoid using generic names such as ‘photo1.jpg’ or a non-relevant structure ‘catpic22356.jpg’. As an example, if you are naming a photo of a car, a naming structure of ‘manufacturer-type’ is appropriate. E.g. ‘volvo-saloon.jpg’

Alt Tags

The alt attribute is a key element to accessibility and is there to give end users who have images turned off or who use screen readers an accurate description of what that images depicts. As such the alt attribute should be used correctly. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t include a couple of keywords to the description.

Content Placement

Once you have your image in place on your page, placing relevant text before and after the images is essential. This can be a perfect opportunity to target long tail key phrases, the traffic obtained from long tail phrases will be much lower than a glamour term but you will find that the conversion rate from long tail traffic will be much higher.

Robots.txt

Finally, insure that your robots.txt file it not excluding access to your image folders.

Guest post by: Alex is a dolphin trainer and swimming pool owner who loves swimming pools and replacing swimming pool filters. You can find him on Twitter here @harvey1dash8.

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Optimising Images For Search Engines originally appeared on: Crenk
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Remember that these images from the February release and there is a good chance things will change before its official release.

• Mac OS X Lion Gets Big Update for Developers: Download Now – March 31, 2011
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Images: Mac OS X Lion originally appeared on: Crenk
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• What’s Interesting with Pinterest? – December 20, 2011
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Easy Image Zoom: jQuery Plugin to Zoom In on Images originally appeared on: Crenk
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Take a look to the complete work in this site.

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A Bunch of WTF Art originally appeared on: Crenk
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With over 6.5M downloads, we cannot say this game did not make a mark; and now, all of the fans can enjoy some of nice quality images as wallpapers:

• Wallpaper for lock screen 1
• Wallpaper for iPhone home 1
• Wallpaper for lock screen 2
• Wallpaper for iPhone home 2
• Wallpaper for desktop Full HD (1920×1080)

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Free Angry Birds Wallpapers originally appeared on: Crenk
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Not only free, FreeOCR is really simple to use: Access the site, click browse for selecting the image you would like to extract the text and just wait for a few seconds. No registration required.

FreeOCR has some limitations about the service: We can upload files up to 2MB, only 10 images per hour, and for PDF files, the text extracted will be only for the first page.

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Extract Text from Images Easily and Free originally appeared on: Crenk
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Most applications we can use related to YouTube are mostly for downloading videos, downloading only the audio file, etc.; but just a few are focused on the uploading process. MP32Tube fits perfectly for users who want to share music or some audio files using the YouTube engine.

Using this application is also very simple: Upload images (jpg, jpeg, gif and png supported); upload the audio file; edit the video info and create the video.

MP32Tube also offers a secure method for using your YouTube account: All the connections to the account are done through Google’s AuthSub API. Meaning they never have access to your password.

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How to Upload MP3 files to YouTube originally appeared on: Crenk
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This new feature appears right after Facebook acquired Divyshot, and the main idea (at least for now) is reducing the amount of clicking users have to execute whenever they are uploading pictures. But wait, if you don’t see this option available in your account, don’t worry; Facebook is kind of beta-testing this feature in 1% of the entire Facebook population.

The face recognition does simplify the uploading process, but it does not automatically tags any of the photos. That automation sounds like the next step, though.

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Face Recognition in Facebook Coming Up originally appeared on: Crenk
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No, seriously, we do not have any spare time, at all… well, maybe I did use the “It’s your problem now” once or twice.

Via eviljaymz.com

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Why People Who Work with Computers Have a Lot of Spare Time? originally appeared on: Crenk
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Here’s the direct download for the ZIP file.

Most of these images are some kind of an abstract art, but very simple and providing those iPad lovers some nice background images. The resolution used is 1024×1024.

Another interesting point regarding this site is a poll currently running. The creator is an Apple lover indeed, with tons downloadable content about it; and the poll created is a very simple one “Are you going to buy the iPad?” With Apple lovers getting to this site, you would probably assume a positive answer; but no 57% said no, 13% that will wait for the next version and just an 8% that already has one.

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100 Wallpapers for iPad originally appeared on: Crenk
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How is this working out for them? Well, according to the neat infographic which they’ve sent us (see below), their traffic and user base is growing fast, and they’ve recently hit some major milestones.

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Tumblr Is Growing Fast: Perfect Tool for Quick Blogging originally appeared on: Crenk
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When you first search for a term, the results are divided up into categories and are all stacked together as shown below.

When you click on one of these stacks the results are shown in a swirl format like below. At first, only one circle is displayed but then you click on an image that circle is moved further down the swirl and a new circle appears. This process repeats itself until your left with a huge swirl of results and the main circle has only one image left in it. When you click on that you’re brought to that image’s page.

A cool new way of searching for images. Check it out here.

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Google Images Has a New Search Product Called Image Swirl originally appeared on: Crenk
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Its main function is to find similar images around the web to that of the one you entered. It’s like the service currently offered by Google Labs.

You can also draw a quick sketch of what you want your picture to look like and submit it so you get back photographs or artwork. You can then filter your results by colour, shape and size. The search engine will also bring back video content that is related to the images – it. If a picture is used as a thumbnail for a video on YouTube then GazoPa will retrieve the video as well.

Check it out here.

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GazoPa: Search Images by Similarity originally appeared on: Crenk
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