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Squidoo
Seth Godin was the first entrepreneur we backed at Flatiron Partners. His company, Yoyodyne, was the first company we sold to a portal (Yahoo!). His blog was the first blog I ever read. And it appears first (or last depending on how you count) on my blogroll.
Seth is an important guy in my life and an important guy in the life of the Web.
So when he announces a new company and a new mission, you must pay attention.
The company is called Squidoo and Seth is launching it in perfect web 2.0 form; with a blog post and a free ebook.
The service is not live yet, not even in "closed beta", but Seth is getting the ideas, the mission, the purpose of Squidoo out there for everyone to discuss, debate, dissect. That's so smart. He's building interest and attention up before the service is launched.
Of course it's easier for Seth to do this than most anyone on the Internet. His blog is the 70th most popular blog on the Internet according to Feedster. So he has a unique advantage in launching a company. And he is using it. Smart move.
So what is Squidoo about? The SquidBlog says:
We’ve built a platform that makes it easy for anyone, even a newbie, to teach people about topics they care about. We believe that everyone is an expert about something, and the Squidoo.com platform is designed to make it easy to do that.
It’s a guide (like about.com) and a reference (like wikipedia.com). It’s a place for personal expression (like typepad.com) and an open platform for real people (like del.ico.us).
You’re probably too busy to have a blog that’s up-to-date all the time, but we’re betting that there’s a topic (even if the topic is ‘you’) that you’d like to start the conversation about.
If you go read the eBook, you'll learn that Seth and Squidoo propose to do this by allowing people to create lenses.
The way I look at it, lenses are personal landing pages that are created about a topic of interest that you are an expert in.
And therefore Squidoo is about creating a peer produced network of personal landing pages about everything in the world.
A big ambition and as we all know, the execution of the idea is what matters.
I am looking forward to creating a lens and participating in this new thing as soon as I can.
You can too. Go give Squidoo your email address.
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Posted October 9, 2005 in Venture Capital and TechnologyComments
Oh, you mean Squidoo is a lot like Tribe :-)
Posted by: P-Air | Oct 10, 2005 12:35:16 AM
I'm not connected with Squidoo at all, but I'll say this:
Squidoo is highly differentiated from Tribe...
From the user perspective it is positioned as a search engine alternative that offers meaning rather than a list of links from which value must be ferreted out.
From the customer perspective it provides superior benefits to advertisers, and shares some of the wealth with contributors.
Friendster, Blogger, MySpace, Linked-In, Yahoo 360, Yahoo Links, Delicious, Flickr, Ning, LiveJournal, and others do not compete directly in this area, but they will; Virtually all search engines and social networks will creep in the direction of Squidoo.
Existing systems, like Tribe, are primarily social. They are not a goal-oriented or deeply driven; they are not a community of experts like Squidoo or About.com.
It takes a motivated community to provide the content that is needed for Squidoo, but anyone can consume the content produced from its community (in the same way that anyone can consume content from About or Wikipedia.)
Squidoo is a business proposition for its contributors, softened with the option to donate to charity. It is meant to have as many people as possible benefit from the success of the system, thus the co-op model.
The charity thing is a good effort but Seth will probably be the first to admit that trust is a problem. He might have reasoned that tainted trust works for About.com and that even Google is somewhat poisoned... but it's a serious problem.
Squidoo is for sure an experimental answer, but I do love it. It just might change what people will expect from the Web, and thus what they will find.
Squidoo's favorite colors are orange and blue, and not by accident. Their least favorite word has four letters and starts with the letter 'b'.
I admire them a lot, and wish them awesome success.
Posted by: Shawn ODonnell | Oct 11, 2005 8:49:05 PM
My thoughts on Squidgy
Sort of like Seth Godin’s Squidoo ...
Read the whole debate here
Posted by: Noel Guinane | Oct 14, 2005 6:11:26 AM
The concept is similar to that of oondi (http://www.oondi.com | http://www.oondi.com | [URL="http://www.oondi.com"]http://www.oondi.com[/URL]) except that oondi will pay out 100% of the advertisement profits to the authors. The hosting costs are covered by clicks which occur on non-author owned pages like the index but it's basically a non-profit organization similar to Wikipedia rather than a commercial one like HubPages or Squidoo.
Posted by: Ken | Jun 16, 2007 3:13:12 PM
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