Squidblog

As we posted over the Summer and messaged to lensmasters individually, we’ve been making a handful of changes to our Squidoo policies, specifically in regards to X-rated content, overly promotional lenses, spam and junk.

Little by little over the last few months, we’ve implemented and released system filters to support our updated policies.

Tomorrow we’ll be scanning the whole site for X-rated lenses and will be locking them from view, after a lengthy heads-up period and several friendly advance notices.

We’re not excited about removing anyone’s lenses, but practically, supporting X rated lenses no longer makes good sense for us or for our community. X rated content is unfortunately more attractive to spammers than to participatory readers and good content creators.

Of course, lensmasters who think their lenses got flagged by accident will be able to request another review, but based on our last few scans and tests, we expect there be very few real false positives.

Squidoo is donating $1000 to charity every day through Thanksgiving.

With a $5000 grand prize on Thanksgiving Day.

To enter and raise money (for free) for your favorite charity on our list, just make a foody lens. Great apple pie recipes, best locally grown squashes, tried and true baking secrets, best coffeemaker recommendations, your family’s Thanksgiving menu — anything and everything food or kitchen, it all goes.

Read up on the rules, then get started building.

Just a heads up about planned maintenance:

Between 6:30pm and 8:30pm Eastern time tonight (Friday, 10/30/09) we’ll be disabling lens editing for some database maintenance. Lenses will be visible and reachable as usual, but lensmasters won’t be able to edit them or create new ones during that 2 hour window.

That is all!

When something is successful, there’s bound to be spinoffs. Bandwagoneers. Hangers-on. Maybe even copycats.

If you’re really successful, you’re also going to see the good side of this: Tools that leverage your platform, ebooks teaching people how to navigate it, blogs spotlighting the best of it, communities grouping up around it, and on and on and on.

A few years ago there was a tenacious business book called Brand Hijack, and it basically said that if you’re not willing to let people hijack the spirit of what you’ve created and make it their own, might as well get out of the kitchen.

So from a Squidoo standpoint, the more I see offshoots and satellite projects that are aiming to teach new lensmasters how to make great lenses, or inform and teach existing lensmasters in a way that adds value to the community, or offer a place for moms to meetup, or a suite of cool addons to help you run your lenses, I am delighted. And thrilled. And impressed by the generosity of so many lensmasters who want to teach and mentor and help.

There’s no stepping on toes if you’re fair and clear and useful and honest and deliver what you say you’re going to deliver.

Keep at it, guys. And thanks.

The new Giant Squid Challenge is a Ning community built especially for lensmasters who are ready to take their Squidoo skills to the next level.

Giant Squid lensmasters and 100 Club members receive oodles of perks that make their lensmaking experience faster and better.

Your Giant Squid Greeters and Organizers are on hand at the Giant Squid Challenge Ning to answer your questions, offer advice, and to give you an honest critique of your lenses.

There are groups that deal with specific lens building topics, tips to give you a leg up when it’s time to apply for Giant or the 100 Club, a weekly lens building challenge to help you reach that magic number of 50 or 100 awesome lenses, and a community of peers where everyone is working together to reach their goals, one lens at a time.

If you’re interested in becoming a Giant Squid lensmaster or are on your way to becoming a new 100 Club member, join us today!

Learn more about the new Giant Squid Challenge today!

PS - questions about becoming a Giant Squid? Learn more from RMS, your Giant Squid Mentor.

I promise not to speak in acronymns for the rest of this post!

We’ve got a few updates big and small for you Squids today, so I’ll get straight to it. Releasing in the next few hours:

1. As part of our Brands in Public project with BzzAgent, we’ll be running free house ads for all the earlybird brands that are participating. They’re run-of-site badges that we hope will help tell our Brands in Public story to some interested surfers and gain some exposure on behalf of our partner brands. Since these ads aren’t designed to monetize directly (like AdSense and Glam and InfoLinks) there is no ad pool for them. You’ll see the ads at the bottom of the righthand sidebar on lenses. We’ll run ‘em for 5 weeks and then we’ll take them off.

2. A new lens header, specifically the nav. This is a global change for all Squidoo pages and relies on good user interface standards that should make it easier for everyone to get around the site. Nothing you need to know or do, and there’s no new content being pushed into the header, it’s just getting reorganized.

3. A special test just for adventurous Giant Squids, coming soon. Stay tuned over on our secret blog for details…

4. This is a fun one for most lensmasters, based on the feedback we got from our preview last week. A new ‘what you see is what you get’ WYSIWYG text editor (to help you bold and link and style your text simply and quickly) and a new module editor overlay that is intended to create a cleaner experience in editing modules in your lens Workshops. For now, the WYSIWYG editor will be limited to the Introduction module so we can test it out together. If all goes well, it will be added to the rest of the modules. Both of these new features were previewed by Giant Squids, and it’s time to try them out on a wider scale.

With eBay’s recent announcement of their Quality Click Pricing plan come some good questions from lensmasters who love (and profit from) our eBay module, and a good dose of patience while we wait for some fixes from eBay.

The short of it is that eBay is changing the way they pay partners, even big and trusted ones like Squidoo. And as they implement some of their changes, other things break. That explains why you’re not seeing the daily eBay stats for your lenses right now, and we’re confident eBay will fix it for us very soon.

Once we know more from eBay about how their QCP plan will work for us, we’ll share it with you right away!

The Rocketmoms project continues to be a rewarding experience for hundreds of creative moms looking for a simple place to write about their favorite topics, while connecting with other moms and friends.

Bonnie, our fearless lensmaster at the helm of Rocketmoms, shares news about what comes next. The highlights, straight from Bonnie to you…

RocketMoms “Try-It” Week: A one week intensive learning session for people who want to TRY RocketMoms. I know from personal experience that it’s intimidating to get people to try Squidoo. After all it’s new and there is a bit of a learning curve. So during this one week session I am going to help whoever joins up build and customize their first lens. From beginning to end I’ll be around all day to answer questions and guide people through the lens building process. This intensive seminar is a one of a kind opportunity to learn how to build one great lens, straight out of the chute. This event is designed for people to try Squidoo, RocketMoms-style, learn the ropes and see if it’s something they might enjoy.

The Rocketmoms Holiday Session: After Try-It Week, there’s a 6 week session of Rocketmoms, starting soon, focused on teaching you how to make (and make money from) Holiday lenses.

All details and dates over on the Rocketmoms blog.

Pretty cool that AddThis, the popular social sharing tool, recently added Squidoo to the mix.

Given that AddThis is on over 400,000 websites, that’s an awful lot of content that is easier than ever to share on your lens in just one click. And one of their cool new features is that the service remembers what sites you share to the most — so if you add links to your Squidoo lenses via AddThis, Squidoo will show up higher on your next visit to a website running AddThis.

Always nice to get a little extra love. Thanks, AddThis.

It’s not just a good way to live life.

What you see is what you get (also known as a WYSIWYG) is also a kind of text editor that makes writing online a little easier!

And at long last, we’ll be offering it in your Squidoo module editors. You’ll be able to quickly bold, resize, pick a few fonts, link sites, and all the basic fun stuff a standard WYSIWYG editor provides. Hopefully this will save you time spent tinkering with html and CSS hacks and will help get back to basics.

Check out a sneak peek.

You’ll see the WYSIWYG in your workshops soon, probably next week. We’ll also be experimenting with a new bigger “overlay” module editor, so you can see more of your content at once with less scrolling about. It should make for a smoother editing experience in the Workshop. We polled the Giant Squids on how they’d feel about it, and with good feedback in hand we’ll be trying the overlay out. If it’s not much loved, though, we’ll be listening and will have the ‘rollback’ button handy!