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Where's your Squidoo ?
Squidoo went live today with their beta product. I did sign up there while it was in private beta last week but did not do much with it ( I was still confused about it). After receiving the email today that Squidoo went public with beta testing, I thought of having a second look at it, also after reading Rajesh's post I thought I will give it a try again.
My initial thoughts while playing with it was why bother! I got blogs that I can write up things and link to the posts that I like. I can display RSS feeds that I like on my blog. My thought was is Squidoo trying to take place of blogs? After thinking and tinkering on Squidoo website, I think the answer is 'No'.
So here is what I think of Squidoo. Squidoo will be playing in parallel with the blogs. It's there to help out blogs and websites. People can use Squidoo to link to the blogs/blog posts they like on a taken topic. They can put down links to their favourite site on the topic. Squidoo can display Technorati tags which can be configured to match the topic and show related posts. For now it can show books at Amazon. People can add their own text on the Squidoo page which can be aggregated through RSS feeds. People can rank Squidoo pages. Squidoo developers are planning in bringing on many more modules (added functionality and features to personal Squidoo pages) in the future. As claimed on the Squidoo faq's, the management at Squidoo is planning to share the revenue with Lensmasters (people who own the Squidoo pages).
So all in all, Squidoo can be a static page which the search engines will index well or it can be totally dynamic page where we aggregate many RSS feeds on a given topic. It can be good for people who don't want to have their own blogs (are not interested in having one or don’t' need one). It is kind of Web 2.0's Geocities, Lycos pages, Angelfire, Tripod etc. Am I missing anything really important here?
I created few Squidoo's for myself which can be found here. Mind you they are not complete, just a start. For myself, not sure how much value it gives me overall. Money wise it might be more advisable to write for my own blogs and get more visitors and getting more money then getting part of the money from there 
. It will be interesting to see how many people take on this offer and continously nourish their Squidoo's.
What is your say towards Squidoo?
4 comments
I found you doing a 'squidoo' google search, and find your commentary interesting. It's such a new site, that it's hard to predict where it will go, but with Seth Godin behind it (and their excellent support team) I can see it getting pretty big.
It was fun creating my first lens about affordable tools & learning html and it's located at http://www.squidoo.com/affordablewebsitecreation/
I am a big proponent of high quality but affordable and even quality free tools to build one's online business, since many are operating on a limited or even zero budget but want to fulfill their dreams.
I made a graphics page for Squidoo Graphics http://bizunlim.com/squidoo/ if anyone wants to use them, they're free for the taking. It was a lot of fun.
My "take" on Squidoo is that you can tell your story, show someone what you have discovered in a unique way, and you don't need your own blog to do so (blogs do seem to require some upkeep to become popular enough to make you an income).
I see it as a great little incoming link for any website business or even your blog, and if you put a little work into it, you could gain more than just the incoming link.
Have a great day,
Donna :-)
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