What do I think? I think having to watch a commercial before being able to watch a commercial is flat-out overkill.

Can the books come out and play?

In case you missed yesterday’s New York Times, here’s a link to Bill Keller’s excellent column about SOPA and copyright. You may get a log in prompt when you hit that link; sorry about that. Here’s a link to an edited version of the column from the Jakarta Globe. (You’d think it would be easier to find a link to a complete version of something called “Steal This Column.”) Anyway, it’s well worth finding and reading. In the column, Keller  heartily recommends Robert Levine’s 2011 book, Free Ride. The “save for later” portion of my Amazon shopping cart just got one book larger.

Since I posted about Pinterest the other day, I’ve spent some time playing with my Pinterest account.

Not only did I find the time to go into my account and figure out how to create boards, add pins and upload pins, I now have seven boards and am starting to understand the Pinterest obsession.

I’m also starting to understand some of the marketing and communications implications beyond “hey, I’m gonna point to something I like.”

Visit Bucks County is the first entity on Pinterest I’ve come across that seems to be doing it right. They have separate boards (think bulletin boards where you can post images of cool stuff) for “Dine in Bucks County,” “Stay in Bucks County,” “Shop in Bucks County,” “Say ‘I Do’ in Bucks County” and more. The trick, of course, is not to just create the board and let it sit (though search will give you some traffic, I assume), but to keep adding content on an ongoing basis.

I’m sorta surprised Zappo’s doesn’t have a presence on Pinterest (they’re great at social media and they’re all about shopping, which is a huge part of what Pinterest is about), but I guess it’s pretty early in the game for companies to be all over the platform. I have no doubt they’ll be crawling all over it before too much longer.

Al Hirt.