Pinterest is en fuego:

An online store putting "manual effort and investment" into Pinterest can get a 9% conversion rate on traffic coming from the site.

9% also beats the conversion rate on traffic from Facebook – 1.13%.

Even if online stores do not invest in their Pinterest presence, the conversion rate on traffic from Pinterest (1.02%) far outstrips traffic from Google Image Search (.54%) and Twitter (0%).

Bloomreach marketing boss Joelle Kaufman says it takes a some amount of work for an online store to get the most out of Pinterest. She says one store that is a Bloomreach client has actually hired a full-time "pinner."

If Pinterest can keep growing – it just hit 19 million users –- it could turn into an incredibly valuable commerce engine, something Amazon, Facebook, or Google should buy.

I have no prediction on whether Pinterest can become a commerce behemoth.

But it certainly has a chance to do so.

Pictures all the way down!

At some point pictures are inadequate without words, right?

There'll always be captions, but I'm sure you can cap them at 140 characters. Words within pictures should suffice and believe me, there's a lot of ways to do that:

o Drawing -- the words are added to the pic as inseparable, think of fail or inspire pics

o Captioned -- the short text in the margins that sometimes go along with it and generally get indexed with it

o Steganography -- Hiding words within the picture itself

o Implicit -- the picture is so obvious there's only so many words that it describes or intends

o Captured -- it's captured with the picture itself from the real world

o Annotated -- meme generator, the pic has different meanings depending on how you annotate it

o Hidden (meaning) -- I love how Google Goggles finds gibberish in random pictures, it reminds me of the big W in it's a mad, mad, mad world.