Squidoo – Informational Social Databases In Practice

Squidoo is a information social database. It is also a means to make money or capitalize on what you know. This is a little different from a web page or blog.

Here is an example. What if you are an expert in one specific thing? What if you gained experience in “comic book collecting” and you want to share that knowledge with others?

You could start a web page or blog but you don’t necessarily want to commit to posting every day. There are Wikis but other people could contribute or distort your content and there is a bit of a learning curve until you learned how to code in Wiki style.

Squidoo pages are called lenses. Each lens is a person who writes or explains about a topic. The person also can provide links to related material (and possibly generate affiliate income) and offer suggestions to other places that a visitor might want to check out.

Here are some examples of Squidoo Library Lens

• http://www.squidoo.com/library20
• http://www.squidoo.com/bloggingthelibrary
• http://www.squidoo.com/kimmels
  

Squidoo gives you get the opportunity to share information and establish a reputation. You also get the opportunity to directly profit from creating a Squidoo page. You tell other people about Squidoo and bada bing, there is a viral exchange of information.

The reality of using Squidoo is that there are some people who know their topic very well and have the talent to write about their subject. There are others folks that put up the bare basics of information but have a lot of affiliate links. Many of the lens are abandoned or never started because the person truly didn't understand the amount of work it would take to make a quality expert page.

Squidoo also has to compete against other information sites like Wikipedia and all the other wikis in cyberspace as well as the beloved Google, About.com and a couple of million blogs. Take a look and tell me what you think.

http://www.squidoo.com