Brand marketers should be paying attention to Pinterest, a virtual bulletin board with a social layer that lets users 'pin up' their interests, inspirations and what inspires them. It's a community network model emerging from the digital ooze that begets innovation as it's bubbling up from a grassroots embrace.

Tech Crunch wrote, "Pinterest Joins Twitter And Facebook As The Newest Self-Expression Engine," while ReadWriteWeb’s take, "User experience, a clean retro visual design, content curation, social collaboration and subscription: those are the things that Pinterest is leveraging to gain a lot of traction and buzz."

Traffic for the beta invite-only community, which launched in March 2010, reached 421 million page views in October, usurping the territory of that craft sites like Etsy established, and publishers and marketers are taking note. Brands on board include Etsy, Nordstrom, Lands' End and Time Inc.Continue reading...

You may not be familiar with 4chan, one of the largest online communities — one that's rife with porn and other NSFW content.

But you may recall how its founder, the 23-year-old Christopher Poole who's better known online as "Moot," managed to get 16.8 million votes on Time's 2009 Person of the Year online poll to land its "most influential person" title. (He was profiled by Time a year earlier, at the ripe old age of 20). 

Poole is now looking to go legit, or at least make some money, by launching another web venture that he officially unveiled yesterday at South by Southwest in Austin.Continue reading...