Hugh at the indispensable oook blog is experimenting with presenting his terrific Nova Scotia Faces project on a service called Squidoo. I’ve just signed up and looked around a little, and a few things strike me immediately about Squidoo:
1. It’s a kind of bloggy personal Wikipedia, i.e., a set of rich media AJAX enabled web pages that allow one to present expertise in a kind of self-publishing model. The result is somewhere between a brochure, a web site, and a self-published book. (The web is starting to look like a giant Mandelbrot set to me, in which microcosm and macrocosm keep repeating each other, but usefully, so that part and whole begin to be implied in each other in very inspiring ways. It’s the One and the Many all over again.)
2. The main metaphor is visual and an appealingly playful riff on Dungeons and Dragons. What one does on Squidoo is create lenses, and creators of lenses are called lensmasters. Digression: one of my favorite writing assignments is to ask students to read one essay in terms of another essay, as if the second essay is a lens through which one views the first, causing some things to pop out and some things to be hidden. It’s the most daunting essay assignment I’ve ever cooked up for freshmen, and the most valuable one. So I’m tickled and encouraged to see Squidoo using this metaphor as well. The cool thing, of course, is that by constructing a lens for others to view your particular interests and expertise, you’re also constructing a lens for yourself, on yourself.
3. Plenty of Web 2.0 goodies present: RSS feeds (I don’t see Atom, and Patrick‘s raising my consciousness about that), tags, community ratings, “about” info, search, clouds, easy links to del.icio.us, etc. Haven’t seen commenting yet, but then it’s designed as a starting point, not an end point. The idea is to drive traffic to your other sites. Actually, what this is, is a front end for an e-portfolio, with dynamic updating and subscribeability. The portfolio doesn’t just aggregate my stuff, though; it showcases my work, which is the idea, right? And won’t it be ironic if e-portfolios become a ubiquitous network-effected instance of social software around the world before higher ed gets around to widespread adoption? I’m thinking a robust e-portfolio system would and should be a prime recruiting tool for admissions departments at every US college and university. But I digress.
4. Here’s a kicker: the whole site is ad-supported. Once the Squidoo folks make enough money to cover their costs and give a little back to charity, whenever that may be, they plan to divide revenue among their lensmasters by lens traffic. If you create a great lens or set of lenses, you get royalties. All the details here. An intriguing idea, not wart-free, but intriguing nonetheless.
5. I’m also intrigued by the two free ebooks that Squidoo founder Seth Godin has made available as a way of educating Squidoo users: Everyone’s An Expert (About Something): The Search For Meaning Online, and its predecessor Who’s There: Seth Godin’s Incomplete Guide to Blogs and the New Web . I’ve skimmed the first bits of each and noted a couple of things. Godin’s a good writer and cares about good writing, his notion of “Incomplete” books is smart, and the free content these books represent is a very savvy part of his business model. Education drives choice and creativity, and what he’s built in Squidoo aims to be a platform for the presentation and empowerment of choice and creativity (“knowledge” is too inert a word here). Who knows how or if it will all work out. I’m not swallowing or advocating its claims here. But the ideas are very, very interesting.
5. Here’s another neat thing about these ebooks. Because they’re about general Web 2.0 topics, they can be repurposed easily. Because they’re free and digital, they can be shared widely. Because they’re licensed under Creative Commons, I have a good and encouraging sense of what use Seth considers fair. I’ll be looking at these ebooks very carefully, with an eye toward using them in my own work at the University of Mary Washington.
6. Stephen Powell blogs on interesting points of comparison between Squidoo and ELgg. Another reminder for me (thanks also to Martha) that I need to learn more about ELgg.
Clicking around I learn more about Seth Godin, and see as always that I have a lot to learn. But that’s a lens, too. I’m still not sure what to make of all these compelling ideas being aggregated in the service of marketing, but this is hardly the first instance I’ve seen over the last 2 1/2 years. Much to mull over. And one sobering reminder of the fragility of our Brave New World: I can’t do a simple “copy image location” to get the Squidoo logo on this blog entry, for while I was writing the site went offline for maintenance. A glitch, I’m sure, but like all such glitches, somewhere between annoying and troubling.