I'm a relative newbie to Pinterest too, so your n00b secret is safe with me. Well, with me and the people who read this blog now, right? :-)

Pinterest is fun because it's simple. Everyone who participates can "pin" images onto a thematic or topical "board" then others can "like" the images or even leave comments. Follow enough people and it's quite a fascinating blend of what multiple people are finding interesting enough to pin, in a very visually oriented fashion. So to some extent, I suppose it's like Digg and related, but way less geeky and way more fashionable and styling...

As with everything I do, I've been experimenting with Pinterest to see how it works and while I find the interface pleasantly uncluttered, I have to say that I cannot seem to get image uploading to work. I've tried multiple times and it invariably ends up with a broken image link on my board. Disappointing.

So for this, I'm going to kill the proverbial two birds with the same stone: I've uploaded an image to Flickr, and am going to "pin" the image to my Random board on Pinterest. If you found an image on another site that you wanted to pin, the process would basically be identical.

To get started, log in to your Pinterest account and locate the top navigational bar:

Click on... wait for it... wait for it... "Add +" and a window pops up:

To include a photo that's elsewhere on the Web already (as we'll have with the photo we uploaded to Flickr) click on "Add a Pin". If you want to try your luck at uploading your own photographs or images, click on "Upload a Pin". Want to create a new thematic or topical board? Click on ... you guessed it... "Create a Board".

I'll click on "Add a Pin", then, in a different browser window, pop over to Flickr and grab the URL of my image in its largest size by command-clicking (PC users should right click) on "Download the Large size of this photo" and choosing "Copy Image URL..." from the context menu:

Now that the URL's loaded into the copy and paste buffer, switch back to the Pinterest page and copy it into the appropriate field on the "Add a Pin" window:

A click on "Find Images" and you'll see a lot more, including a thumbnail of the image in question:

Pick which Board you want -- I'll choose "Random" -- and add a description of some sort. Done? Click on "Pin It" and it's now part of the Pinterest image stream:

Nice and easy.

As to uploading your own images? Lots of people tell me that they have no problems with it, but so far I haven't been able to make it work for my Pinterest account. Perhaps I'm using bad image formats or a browser that's not 100% compatible? I'll keep digging...