The sheer number of websites available right now for bookmarking and sharing your favorite stuff online is a little bit overwhelming. You’ve got the social media sites like Facebook and Google Buzz where you engage in conversation but can also share and bookmark links. You’ve got the sites like Digg and Tip’d that are specifically designed for sharing with little other conversation. And then you’ve got a variety of other websites that serve many of the same functions to one degree or another. So why would you want to add yet another site like this to the array of sites that you’re already using? Because every once in awhile someone creates a site that is just different enough and just cool enough that it’s worth trying it out to see if it’s right for you. Pinterest is one of those cool sites.

Pinterest is a site where you can tag items that you like and arrange them into inspiration boards. It is particularly great for creative people who already use inspiration boards in their work. For example, let’s say that you are a fashion designer and you are collecting inspiration for a new line of clothing. You can create a board just for that on your Pinterest account. Then you can add the “pin it” widget to your tool bar. When you travel around the web and see something that inspires your line, you can simply “pin it” to the board. What gets pinned is the image – it’s a picture-rich site – but then you can add your own tags and details to make it more yours.

Of course, you don’t have to be artsy to make Pinterest useful to you. You may be trying to figure out how you want to decorate your new apartment or what gifts you want to buy your boyfriend or which hairstyles interest you most. You can create boards for anything that you want, scour the web for the images that are right for you and then pin them to the board. The boards can be your own personal thing or you can share them with others. You can browse through others’ boards on the site to get information (and can even easily re-pin pictures of theirs that you like).

What’s really great about the site is that it automatically links back to the original place where you took the image. This is good because it gives the proper attribution to the site that sourced the image. Plus it’s great because it means that you can go back and find where you originally saw the item if you want to use it again. Pinterest is in beta right now but you can request an invitation to join it and check it out.

If you want to see how some people are using the site, check out the Pin It Forward project. A group of 300 different bloggers all made Pinterest boards about “what home means” and then blogged about their boards on their own personal blogs. It’s a very creative project that is helping to launch Pinterest and to show the world what it can really be about.

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