“If you haven’t heard of Pinterest, you’re a big dork.”

Hold your fire. That statement comes courtesy of ReadWriteWeb, a tech blog that shamed readers not on the year-old visual bookmarking site, noting Pinterest’s 10,000 glowing iPhone app reviews and its popularity among women. (The good news: The blog caters to techy types, so your ignorance can be excused. The bad news: That quote was from mid-September, so if you still haven’t heard of Pinterest, yup, back to big dork status.)

Here are the basics: Pinterest, started by two Yalies, describes itself as a “virtual pinboard,” a place to save and organize the images that catch your eye online and share them with other people interested in the same things. Users create “boards” dedicated to home design, recipes, sneakers or any other subject and fill them with “pins” that link back to the original sites. Other users can like the posts, comment on them or repin them to their own boards, and they can follow people or boards that they consistently enjoy.

And here’s the truth: Pinterest is addictive. Browsing the collage of images from people I follow, I’m suddenly interested in cooking phyllo mushroom bundles, making a mason jar snowglobe and buying a poster with the sage wisdom “Haters gonna hate. Potatoes gonna potate.” I see my personal style coalescing into something more cohesive than my closet on one board, while another is full of design inspiration for a new apartment’s bare yellow walls.

With Pinterest, the magazine-collage bulletin board has finally entered the digital age ... and if you haven’t heard of it, you’re a big dork.