Oh, I couldn’t resist the graphic from BizUnlim 🙂
I discovered the concept of Lens a while ago and have recently revisited them at Squidoo. You can see my meagre efforts of exposing
A lens is basically a single page fact sheet. You could have one for every day of your life I guess, or for every topic which interests you. It’s not designed to be a blog, but as a collection I guess there is some cross over.
Squidoo have included the basics of writing articles, lists, including RSS feeds and images. They’ve even found a way to monetise it with revenue sharing.
The target market appear to be people who don’t have a website but who find the concept of a blog too informal or inappropriate. They just want to list some information, display their contact details and get on with life.
A secondary market will be people like me, looking for novel ways to promote my sites but not duplicate the offerings I have already. A lens is more stable than a directory listing and I can present it with more detail.
Each lens is a subfolder of the main Squidoo domain so it’ll be interesting to see how Google reacts to the size of the site, and if it differentiates between each lens.
Will my lens be damaged by your lens linking to a bad neighbourhood or having dodgy content?
Will I get automatic PR because my lens is on a domain that’s been around for a while?
Finally, as with any thirdparty offering, the content I put up could vanish tomorrow so I need to backup (via the XML tool) anything I don’t want to lose. And I can’t control some of the optimisation options such as HTML markup, Google Sitemaps etc.
In the meantime it’s an interesting experiment 🙂
Squidoo ran a lensmaster challenge for the best lens focussed on Boing Boing. Ummm, right. Thinking about travel – lets see what they have and so Boing Boing Trips was born. Surprise!!! The judges (Heath & Co) awarded me third place, what a hoot. And a mention on Boing Boing Squidoo winners.
So, I’m now an award winning Squidoo lensmaster. Whoot!
I have looked at squidoo for a while and have started to notice that some lens are ranking well at Google. My first len Instant-Article-Wizard hasn’t ranked at all. I wonder how long the ride for all these lens will last? Before something changes.
You can’t wait for Google to find your Squidoo Lens, it will take a long time!!
You should do the following to get your lens index faster
1. ping it at pingoat.com
2. Digg it with digg.com
3. Send it to onlywire.com
You will see your lens being indexed by Google within 24 hours!