Why Image-Sharing Network Pinterest Is Hot

In June, Kirsty Colquhoun decided to do one homemade project every day for a year. Colquhoun, a mother of two in Auckland, New Zealand, documented the experience on her blog, 365 Days of Pinterest Creations. As the title suggests, she got the idea for each of her projects—peanut butter cookies, Barbie sleeping bags—from photos she saw on Pinterest, a kind of social network that centers around finding, collecting, and sharing images from across the Web. “I don’t have a lot of time for scrolling around the Internet looking for great websites I can trust,” Colquhoun says. Pinterest is “like the encyclopedia of great blogs for someone who has no idea where they should be looking.”

Less than two years after its launch, Pinterest has become the favorite website of moms, do-it-yourselfers, home cooks, brides-to-be, and others not generally known for their obsessions with startup fads. Traffic has increased sevenfold in the last five months, and marquee venture capitalists put $27 million into the company in October.