My Squidoo Table of Contents

Remember the self-referential Seinfeld episodes where Jerry and George were pitching "a show about nothing?" Well Squidoo is very much a site about itself. The Squidoo Tips Topic is a never-ending source of fascination, since Squidoo is designed for beginners and thrives on "new blood."

There are a lot of very popular "how-to" lenses for beginners, and if you're just starting you should consider writing one. Even though the Squidoo interface is pretty self-explanatory documentation is practically non-existant and pages of screen-shots walking newbies through the process seem to get plenty of traffic.

Even if you're just starting to Squidoodle, you can gather your thoughts for your own reference, and possibly for those you may recruit later. Don't forget there's a $5 bonus for you and anyone you sign up once they earn $15 in total royalties. (If they ever do.)

You might wonder why I've concentrated so heavily on Penguin Publishers. That's a fair question. Other than the fact that I really do like Penguin books, it goes back to one of Squidoo's earlier bright ideas -- co-branded groups. You might notice that the URLs of these pages are in the "penguingroup" subdirectory. That has potentially advantageous implications with searchengines.

I had no idea at the time that Squidoo would wind up abandoning the scheme in mid-implementation creating Orphan Groups. I still can't believe it, but I'm not maligning anyone because I respect them so much. (It's in the terms of service agreement. You might actually read this one! )

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Penguin Classics is an imprint of the Penguin Group for a selection of noted literary works. This Collection -- an Amazon exclusive -- includes them all.

If you don't want the more than 1000 books that includes there are several smaller collections as well, listed below under Component Collections. There are also some "bonus" titles (like the Steinbeck books to round things out

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I've been featuring American Girl® products since at least 1999, and customers (and their daughters) seem to love them!

This is the one "American Girl" page that isn't interlinked with the rest. It features the American Girl Series Teacher's Editions and other grown-up things. The individual historical character pages and the "Meet the American Girls" index were intended more for younger readers, which is tricky since the target audience ranges from 4 to 13.

This is the table of contents and general merchandise page. Remeber critics. Ages 4 to 13!

The Eighteenth Century American Girls Include Kaya, the Nez Perce girl and Felicity Merriman, from the British Colonial period.

The Editors of Amazon.com prepare Listmania® recommendations on a variety of subjects, and I've screenscraped the links and resyndicated them with links to social bookmarks. ( I first discovered in Squidoo because I was interested in RSS technology.)

It's fine to say "Everybody's an expert at something," but these recommendations are from actual acknowledged experts, and from Amazon customers who have been voted to the top.

I went a little overboard with RSS on this one, learning what various third-party services could do. These feeds are screen-scraped from Amazon "feature" pages, which aren't available via AWS. They are basically "static" (i.e. the content doesn't change), or "evergreen" -- the preferred term in Web 2.0 circles.

See National Geographic Group