Claim your Squidoo space
Famed marketer Seth Godin and others have setup a new online platform called Squidoo that is finally in public beta mode. Steve Rubel mentions how he doesn't understand what benefit Squidoo brings over having your own blog. But I think he's missing the point. After playing around with Squidoo briefly, here are my own observations.
Squidoo is all about building portals, not blogs. A portal is an aggregation of content into a single page. It's meant to provide a snapshot view of things. The terminology is widely-known in the enterprise software space — there are companies (like my employer) that make money selling portal management software to other companies as a way for their employees to manage reams of information coming from diverse systems. But consumers also use portals when they use services like personalized Google and My Yahoo!.
But unlike standard portals, Squidoo's portals — which they call lenses — are meant to be viewed by the general public. They're outward-facing portals instead of inward-facing portals. They get ranked through a feedback system. There's also a revenue-sharing incentive to encourage the Squidoo users to setup and maintain the portals, although you can donate the money raised to charity if you want to be philanthropic.
Will Squidoo take off? I can't predict that, although I think the revenue-sharing angle is a good idea for keeping the lensmasters (the people who create portals) interested in their lenses.
As an AdSense publisher, I recommend you investigate Squidoo now. Go and claim yourself some space in the Squidoo system before all the good URLs are gone. You can easily build yourself a lens that acts as an aggregator for your sites and blogs, for example, which is exactly what I've done with the Eric Giguere lens. In a few minutes, I was able to get my main blog (this one — for now) listed and a couple of my other sites (EricGiguere.com and the Invisible Fence Guide) listed. With a bit more effort, I'll be able to do things like add links to Amazon for my books, search Technorati for related postings, and so on.
Do I expect to make a lot of money from these lenses? No. But if Squidoo takes off it'll be another way to get some traffic to my blogs and sites. It'll be another way for people to find my content. Although it's still in beta and there are some rough spots — I've had issues with some of the functionality in my version of Firefox — it's definitely something to investigate further.
Eric Giguere is the author of Make Easy Money with Google, a real (printed!) introductory AdSense book for non-technical people, available at all fine bookstores. Be sure to download the free sample chapter for more information about the book. Or add it directly to your Amazon shopping cart!