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It's easy to sign up with Squidoo. Just enter your name and e-mail, pick a Squidoo username and password, then verify that you are not a 'bot by copying a "security word" from the screen display. Takes about two minutes.

Of course you should read the Terms of Service, but there is nothing extraordinary about them: No hate-speech, criminal conspiracies, sexually explicit content -- that sort of thing. (Squidoo's PRIVACY POLICY is item #8.)

After you've signed up, you'll be able to log in at Squid U, which includes an extended version of the Squidoo FAQ in the form of several articles

If you are an experienced webmaster or blogger, you may not find a lot of surprises there, but there are still some useful Squidoo-specific tips you'll want to read. For beginners, the Squidoo staff has compiled a pretty thorough overview of "the basics" that will save you a lot of time and trouble.

You don't have to be the world's leading expert in a topic to have something to say that people will want to hear. Anything you're interested in, or are currently learning about is a good topic for a lens.

You can start with a simple Link List Module and just plug in the URLs of interesting and useful articles you find online. As the list grows, you may want to delete some articles, change their order, add some descriptive notes, before you know it your note-taking space will become a significant online resource in its own right.

Lenses are easy to update, and frequent modifications will even improve our Lensrank, so don't succumb to "writer's block" -- just get something down "on paper" (actually "online") and revise and improve upon it later.

A lot of new users find the "lens" terminology a little too cute for their tastes. (I know I did.) After a while, though, it grows on you and even seems appropriate.

There is a tremendous amount of data online, too much for anyone to absorb. The web doesn't need more pages nearly as much as it needs better ways of sifting through existing content to find relevant information.

The best lenses are "meta-pages" that bring together outstanding resources and focus the reader's attention on the best materials available on the subject.

If you look through the Top 100 Lenses at any given time, chances are you will find some that are little more than annotated link lists, so don't hesitate to transfer some of your "favorites" or "bookmarks" to a lens, and take it from there.