Library clips

Robin Good has the low down on Squidoo.

Squidoo is like creating your own topic page, similar to how a library creates Subject Information Guides or Pathfinders…or even like your own about.com…more from the Squidoo blog.

Here are some examples (there are also more at the end of the e-book mentioned below).

Here is an e-book explaining our search woes and how Squidoo relieves you from poking around the web.

As Seth explains a Lens (a topic you make make in Squidoo, well they don’t have to be topics they can be your own profile page, whatever) is different to a blog as it doesn’t hold content it points to content.

But it is as easy as a blog to set-up, without Squidoo it’s much harder to set up a webpage.

Seth points out what we truely do when we surf the web…we may be researching a product for example so we poke around looking for prices, reviews…how do we do this, we search Google with a search term and slug through the results, maybe something like Clusty is better as results are in clusters.

After a long time we compile all our research, make an analysis, and prepare to make a decision…but has the Google ranking helped us to find stuff about our product, what if there are hundreds of thousands of hits.

Anyway, as an alternative you can now go to Squidoo, type in your search term, and hopefully find a topic page for what you are after…why bother researching when someone has done all the ground work.

From the e-book in relation to using a search engine:

“You’re not seeking the answer at first - first you want to understand the meaning behind your choices”

“…the first version of the Web is still focused on poking. It will always be. It delivers matches, but it doesn’t deliver meaning”

Of course there are webpages out there that already do this, but how do we know which ones they are in our Google results, with Squidoo they are all in one spot…also the ease of creating these topic pages will increase the quantity made compared to what’s out there presently.

The only thing I can think so far that is similar to Squidoo is About.com, but then this isn’t collaborative, Squidoo is made by the people for the people…Wikipedia is a similar idea but these aren’t one stop topic pages, these are encyclopedia entries, they are restricted to this concept.

So we have gone from collecting and sharing links in del.icio.us to expanding that concept to a list of links in Wink, MemeFlow, and JetEye, to a topic hub page or Lens in Squidoo.

It seems looking at the sample Lens that you will be able to tag them, so maybe they will live in a type of folksonomy environment (related tags, related Lenses, Tag cloud, neighbourhood), give ratings (social ranking), subscribe to a Lens with RSS, and LensRoll a Lens.

Lenses will rank well in search engine results as they are considered authoritative, and the webpages they point to will rank higher because they are being pointed to by an authoritative source…so what happens when Lenses are pointing to each other, top ranking for everyone…see more on Hub and Authorities.

There is also ways to make money with a Lens…read the e-book is great stuff!