All About Squidoo

I wrote a post a week ago talking about products that become platforms.

I started it off with a discussion about the Mahalo/Gnomedex thing. That was a mistake. It clouded the point I was trying to make. And that point is that the best products become platforms at some point. And things that start out as platforms have a hard time becoming products.

The other day I stumbled upon SquidWho. SquidWho is one of a number people search engines that are cropping up. Other notable "people search engines" include WikiYou, WInk, and of course LinkedIn and Wikipedia can be used for searching people.

What's more interesting to me about SquidWho is what it represents. It's an application built on top of Squidoo, the service that let's people make webpages about things they are passionate about. Squidoo is kind of like a truly peer produced About.com. And despite some recent controversy about Squidoo being spammed up, it's a fairly popular service.

Squidoo is one of the 500 most popular websites according to Alexa. comScore says Squidoo has over 4mm unique visitors per month worldwide. Squidoo has excellent search engine optimization so the pages you create in it get indexed highly in Google.

That's a good place to start when you want to build a web app. Like a mini version of Facebook, Squidoo is a platform because it has eyeballs and unlike Facebook, it has great google juice.

According to Seth Godin, the founder of Squidoo, SquidWho was built in five weeks from initial idea to launch. And they have a bunch more of these "apps" coming. What's next? I sure hope they open up the Squidoo platform to web developers so thousands of apps can be built on top of Squidoo. That's how a product becomes a platform.

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An online community of 'lenses' allows people to earn a buck while sharing their expertise.

Internet marketing pioneer Seth Godin wants his new start-up firm Squidoo.com to make money. But unlike most business executives, he wants to give his money away -- to charity and to the people who power his site.

Squidoo is an online platform of hand-built directories that anyone can create for free using a tool on the Squidoo site. The directories, also called lenses, resemble blogs, except each lens is devoted to a single topic.

Squidoo acts as an intermediary to search engines, giving people a "big picture" view on any given topic.

"Google is too good," Godin said, adding that a search engine might turn up millions of pages for a given search, potentially overwhelming people with information.

The Squidoo site allows so-called lensmasters to share their expertise on a given topic so others don't have to wade through piles of information.

The top 100 lenses visited on Squidoo include topics ranging from the power of raw food to ways for transforming your office cubicle into a gym. Martha Stewart even hosts a lens on making cookies.

Squid have large eyes, and each lens on Squidoo provides a view on the world, Godin said, explaining the origin of the company's name. It ends in "oo" since tech companies with two "o"s in their name -- Google, Yahoo!, Godin's own Yoyodyne -- have all been a success.

Web sites featuring online guides and solutions aren't anything new, consider About.com. But Squidoo rewards its lensmasters with a cut of the earnings received from ads and other revenue-generating links on the site.

All revenue is first applied towards the company's overhead costs. Then, 5 percent of all revenue is donated to charity. Once that requirement has been met, lensmasters start to share in the profits.

Half of the revenue generated from Google ads posted on each lens goes to Squidoo's top lensmasters, based on rank and traffic numbers. Lensmasters also pocket half of all other revenue, such as that generated from sales made via links to sites like Amazon.com or eBay.

Lensmasters might make around $1 or $2 a day from each lens they build, Godin estimated. They can also choose to donate their earnings to charity. But there's no guarantee people will be able to make enough to quit their day jobs, since earnings will depend on how popular their lenses are and how many directories they maintain.

(All revenue is being donated to charity while the site is in its Beta phase. Lensmasters will start receiving royalty payments once that's over, probably sometime before late spring, Godin said.)

At first glance, Squidoo's business model may seem a little unusual. It does, after all, call for giving away half of the company's earnings.

But Godin is no novice when it comes to spearheading new ideas. He founded Yoyodyne, the leading direct-marketing company on the Internet, and sold it to Yahoo! during the late 1990s dotcom boom.

Godin said he wants to build Squidoo into a self-sustaining profitable company. He also wants to raise $100 million for charity and make it possible for 100,000 people to eventually quit their job. That might be manageable since the company -- which only employs four people -- has fairly low costs.

"All we built was the platform. People are coming to build the pages," Godin said.

In the two months since the Beta version of Squidoo has been in operation, nearly 14,000 lenses have been created --10 times more than Godin had expected at this point.

Web platforms like Squidoo represent the new way of thinking about Web sites, Godin said. They're also models of efficiency and growth, he said, referring to the popularity of sites such as Flickr, which allows users to share photos, and del.icio.us, which lets people share their bookmarks.

"All these sites are growing because they're nothing but platforms for normal people to say what they think."

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It's not easy making a living as a beef jerky authority these days.

The jerky publishing industry churns out precious few books on the topic, magazines and newspapers never give dried meat its due and reality television hasn't quite caught up to it.

But blogging about jerky could be just the ticket.

Late last month a new Internet site, Squidoo.com, began offering Internet authors the chance to earn money on their obscure expertise, be it on taxidermy, vegetarianism or even jerky.

The idea is to harness the knowledge that bloggers typically offer the world, but which average readers might struggle to find on their own. And while the site is not old enough to judge as a success or failure, it helps point to the enormous opportunity Internet entrepreneurs see in Web sites that are built on the postings of average people, as MySpace was, and the continuing zeal among users to publish their ideas online.

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Squidoo.com this week announced version 2.0. With nearly 60,000 user-generated pages pointing to the best stuff online and donating royalties along the way, Squidoo is the fastest-growing philanthropic community site on the web.

Every Squidoo page (called a lens) can now be turbocharged with Plexo, a simple service that allows each visitor to rank blogs, books, movies, songs, and soon even YouTube videos and Flickr pictures. Using a simple up or down vote, the millions of people who visit Squidoo each month can cheer for their favorites in any category-or submit their own.

Plexo joins the other Squidoo features (eBay auctions, Google maps, iTunes songs, Amazon shopping, RSS feeds and more) and makes it even easier for people of all levels to present a snapshot of information online, so that searchers can find exactly what they're looking for. Fast and with meaning.

"Squidoo started as a way for one person to share his ideas, recommendations and expertise on a particular topic, in a free and easy and interesting way. Now we're going a step farther and letting lensmasters open their lenses to their readers for a new level of collaboration," said Megan Casey, editor in chief of the site.

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As the web continues to grow, finding the really good stuff becomes more of a challenge. But there are road maps available, made by people with local knowledge - specialists and enthusiasts itching to show you their favorite web sites.

We are talking about a new genre of web community where you or I or anyone who feels like it can create topic based gateways to the web. Once upon a time there was About.com the and Open Directory Project (ODP) where voluntary editors edited submissions to the directory. But the number of editors was relatively low and it was considered a decidedly geeky hobby to be an editor.

These new web sites have thousands upon thousands of "editors" - people who make portals or lenses or spots to present the very best web sites and resources on a topic where they have some expertise or enthusiasm. You can see the web through their eyes and find great content on almost any topic.

Squidoo

Squidoo is a network of so called lenses - single page blogs that highlight a person's recommendations or expertise. Anyone can make a lens and the lenses present any kind of topic from business intelligence to breast feeding.

The idea is not primarily for the lenses to hold content. They recommend or promote content on good web sites out there. The way these sources are combined and annotated is what potentially makes a lens a gateway to good web content.

Users who create lenses are called lensmasters. Lensmasters provide links, feeds, abstracts, and lists, helping you to make sense of a topic. Lenses often point to Amazon books, Flickr photos, YouTube videos, Google maps, blogs, and more.

Lenses are rated by other users and also ranked by popularity, so the highest ranked will be the most useful, and the lenses with poor content will sink to the bottom.

Squidoo splits its revenue with the lensmasters. 5% goes straight to charity, 50% goes to the lensmasters and 45% goes to Squidoo. About half of all the lensmasters are donating their royalties to charities.

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What do you get when you cross About.com, Wikipedia, blogs and social networks? If you're author and online marketing guru Seth Godin, the answer is Squidoo -- a new company he launched to host Web pages written by experts in various topics

These pages, which he calls lenses, aim to highlight one person's view of a topic and hopefully distill the information into the perfect starting point for researching a given topic. An ideal lens will provide a searcher with the "big picture" on the subject, with annotated links to the most relevant sites on the topic -- similar to the guidance a trusted librarian would offer.

"We're beginning to see the backlash of one-size-fits-all search," Godin told ClickZ News. "There's a real desire to deliver something like what we're doing. Lenses as an idea will survive, whatever happens to Squidoo. This idea of boiling it down and giving people not everything, but just what they need, has a rightful place at the table when people search.

Squidoo will be set up as a co-op, meaning all the lens creators have the potential to share in the revenue generated by ads on their site. Lenses by default will include AdSense text ads, with proceeds going to charity. Lens creators who are in it for more than an ego boost can opt to keep the royalties for themselves, add affiliate links, or link to their own Web sites from the lens.

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Forgive the non-LA post this morning, but we got to wondering if the news yesterday of the U.K. terrorist-plot arrests had increased traffic for Heath Row.

No, not Heathrow, silly. That's an airport. We're pretty sure traffic there was all kinds of awful. We mean Heath Row, the Gotham-based former editorial director of fastcompany.com and senior director of community development for Squidoo who became a blogger, like, the same day Al Gore invented the Internet.

Heath reports this morning that traffic on his Media Diet site yesterday was up by 1/3. Those seeking information about flight delays and security concerns were treated to Heath's thoughts on Henry James instead.

Which, in light of everything that's happened in the world, is kinda funny.

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