More on Squidoo: portals vs. blogs

I've had some feedback and questions about the comments I've left elsewhere about Squidoo and in my posting Claim your Squidoo space, so I thought I'd discuss is some more.

When I said that Squidoo was about building portals and not blogs, the distinction between isn't very apparent to some people. After all, these are all just websites, right? But it's not the technology we're talking about here, it's the way they present information that's important.

Here's the basic difference: portals are parallel, blogs are serial. In other words, portals show you a current snapshot of many things at once while blogs show you things in chronological order. In enterprises, portals are often used to provide “dashboard” views of various things, to integrate data from different sources into a single-page summary that you can drill into for more details. And like I said, you can get that today from customized portals on Google and Yahoo!. The Squidoo folks are just making it easy for you to create (and find, and monetize) portals for others to use. Portals are normally all about personalization — here's the information I want — but the Squidoo lenses are external-facing portals — here's the information I want to show you.

Portals are nothing new, and no one would tout them as leading-edge “Web 2.0″ technology. But Squidoo is trying to make them different by wrapping a community around them — and that's a Web 2.0 concept if there ever was one.

Squidoo is not a replacement for blogs. Portals never really took off among consumers before, so I can't be confident that Squidoo will succeed where others didn't. But the community aspect (and the monetization — let's never forget the money draw) may be the thing that pushes it to the next level.

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!

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