Short day today - there's a column to make up, and an interview.

QUESTION: Is Pinterest mostly for women? Yes, in the sense that the ocean is mostly for fish. Other species are welcome, and there's no reason they can't use the medium for their own purposes. Unlike Tumblr, which is a transparent platform, malleable and customizable, Pinterest has a certain character. I don't know if that's because of the early colonizers, or something about the idea of collecting pictures based on interests that do not involve naked people. Whenever I check the board of someone who's followed my boards, or repinned something I put up, it's like wandering into a stranger's closet and finding it full of Victorian dresses and boxes of lace doilies and porcelain dolls. The few men on Pinterest seem to be like guys at a wedding, retreating to a corner to talk about Manly Things like shaving implements and cars and airplanes.

Someone else seems to think it's a female thing, because they came up with a male version: Gentlemint. It has bacon bourbon and some tech and a danged manly stories like "How to turn a WWII Field Phone into a Bluetooth Handset," which ranks as #1 on the list of things I will not be doing this weekend. It's an interesting idea, but I'd hate to see Pinterest become part of the great online Gender Ghetto like so many other sites, because . . . .

Well, I'm not sure why; there's no problem with men and women self-segregating into sites to discuss issues that interest them. But Pinterest's UI is too good to be niche. It's tumblr, more or less, but so much easier. You can post without leaving the page you're on, which is magically delicious; the grid is better than the endless scroll of some tumblr pages. I suspect that Posterous is watching Pinterest carefully - if you remember, Posterous was one of the Tumblr alternatives that never got traction - they were a Tumblr alternative at a time when Tumblr was heading to MySpace status, but then Tumblr just took off again. Posterous was bought by Twitter, which suggests something's coming down the pike.

Then again, maybe Dropbox is working on something that will render Pinterest obsolete as well. That's the teaser for this video. Which I couldn't finish.

Guaranteed: all of these things will seem terribly quaint in ten years, when we're swapping holographic 3d images projected from a hockey-puck shaped unit on our desk.

OLD STUFF: This is a live commercial for Westinghouse Frost-Free Fridges. Key word: Live. On a popular show. The nation is watching. The camera light goes on. You start talking; you try to open up the fridge . . .

And it doesn't open. The commercial is about the inside of the fridge. What do you do? You plow ahead. The director in the booth or the floor send the camera in for a closeup while someone shoots on the set to try the door, and when it opens the director waves the camera back. But there's still one problem. The woman doing the spot doesn't really know how the fridge opens. Will she figure it out?

She doesn't miss a beat.

INTERNET: Buzzfeed has a "Copyranter" feature, where a guy named Mark Duffy posts some ads and sprinkles a little snark, doesn't really say anything or make a point, but stands there with his hands on his hips and an amirite? smirk. But he uses the F word in his bio, so he must be really good at this. Anyway, they posted one of those OMG "The Past Did Not Conform to Modern Sensibilities!" things, this time a McDonald's ad. Because context is <i>hard</i> and research is <i>boring, you won't see the rest of the campaign, but someone at Fark found the entire series of ads.

We have found the man responsible for 37% of all internet comments. (Contains one bad word.)

You have to admire his passion! He makes some good points.

See you around; have a good lunch.