Squidblog

Thanks to lensmasters old and new for a great time at the MakerFaire this past weekend. You prompted smart conversations and asked hard questions, and shared more than a double dose of support.

Extra thanks to Steve Hall, Denise Caruso and Raj Sharma for helping, Cynthia Louden for trying, Drew Sanocki and Dan Yue for saying hi, and the hundreds more who stopped by.

For the rest of you who couldn’t be there, here are some pictures!

And don’t forget, there’s still time to make your own official MAKE magazine lens about your hobby, craft, game or hack. Or, pass the invite along to your friends.

There’s still about a week left before the final deadline to enter Squidoo’s Boing Boing Challenge. I’d like to highlight some of the best entries so far — and encourage people to continue building their existing entries, as well as to get involved if you haven’t already. We’ve got some excellent contenders, and it’s not too late to make your own.

• Marc Sirkin’s Fill up Your iPod lens focuses on the best mashups, podcasts, and other audio and video featured in Boing Boing.
• Boing Boing Goes Body Art, a lens by Rachel Schwarz, collects the popular blog’s nods to body modification.
• And Erin Banister’s Boing Boing Is Changing the World considers the impact that Boing Boing could have on things like war, DRM and banking.

Who knew that you could look at a single blog from so many different angles?

We encourage everyone who’s involved so far to continue polishing and refining their Boing Boing-related lenses. And if you’d like to enter a new lens yourself — Take the Boing Boing Challenge.

Off to the MakerFaire for the weekend.

I’ll see some of you there. Thanks to everyone for the great interest and enthusiasm!

P.S. If you’re in the mood for a fun text message trick, text the word “squidoo” to 66937. You’ll get a secret code to login to Mozes (invite only). Mozes.com is a cool new platform that deftly jumps the fence from offline experience to quick online information. In this case, you get a digital goodybag of info and ebooks and lenses all about Squidoo. Probably stuff you already knew. But did your friends?

P.S. So, what makes a good recommendation?

1. First-person experience.
2. Enthusiasm.
3. Specificity.
4. Sincerity.
5. Clarity.

The difference between good (action-inducing) and bad (zzzzzz) recommendation is the difference between one person saying:

“I”ve read a lot of history books, but this is the best I’ve ever found on the Roman Empire, and if you read it you will have a firm grasp on Roman history and architecture and I guarantee you’ll be booking the next flight to Italy.”

and the other saying,

“I guess I liked this novel, but you probably won’t.”

Which book would you buy?

I’ve gotten a lot of great feedback about the NYT article last week. A few people, though, are a little befuddled that it was filed as an e-commerce report.

Q: “Is Squidoo, then, all about the money?”

Shortest answer: No.

Less short answer: Right now, 80% of you should think of the money as a perk, like free coffee or a $2-off coupon. A bonus on top of something you were going to do anyway. The other 20% of you, like nonprofits and entreprenurial types and online salesfolks and our featured affiliates, should think about the money potential in aggregate. What happens when your members or customers create 1,000 lenses all sending their royalties to your organization, and all point to your product or idea? Then the payout becomes a compelling possibility. But even then, it’s still only part of what we’re all doing here.

Not at all short answer: Our society (and our site) is unabashedly action-based. Action can often mean buying and selling something. But action can also mean forming a political opinion, or emailing a cookie recipe to a friend, or learning more about autism. Action can mean making miniature crochet bears for fun, or it can mean sending more traffic to your eBay auctions.

And so the important thing here is what causes the action. What is the secret sauce behind every interaction? What’s the nudge, the lighted fire, the springboard, the jumpstart?

9 times out of 10, it’s recommendation. Recommendation is the fundamental, LCD of all the stuff you’re hearing a lot about these days: user-generated content, personalized search, filters…. Recommendation is what web 2.0 is all about.

Of course, the best recommendations are authentic and personal and trusted, which makes it easy for you to take action on them. That’s why we invite passionate people to make lenses on topics they know or care a lot about.

Some of our best lenses are about spreading ideas, awareness for issues, sharing advice, giving hobbyist how-to’s. Basically, great content from passionate communities. Recommendation from real people.

And yes, in the case of our commerce or fundraising lenses, the better the recommendation, the more people trust it, the more action taken, the more money you could make.

It’s always nice to start off the morning with a newspaper and a cup of coffee.

Even nicer when you open the paper and lo and behold…there’s a write-up about your site!

See today’s New York Times for a great article about Squidoo.

And congrats to our newest celeb lensmaster, Bob Jenkins, for his fabulous work on the now famous Jerky lens!

Last month, while at South by Southwest Interactive, I took some time to sit down with lensmaster Scott Allen, the guide for Entrepreneurs on About.com. He recorded our conversation and recently posted it as a podcast.

Our conversation touches on many topics, including the ideas behind the company, how people are using Squidoo, the social aspects of the platform, how it compares to other online services and how people can make money with Squidoo. Might be worth a listen!

Another parallel listen of note is Roy Blumenthal’s Virtual Surf Report on Squidoo from late last year.

The Squidoo team is proud as punch about the new Typepad widget. Not only does it mean that we get to work with one of our favorite companies and products — but that a whole new crew of web readers and writers can use Squidoo to improve their blogs and web presence.

We’ve created a lens specifically for Typepad bloggers that offers some tips and tricks for making lenses that solidly support your blog — and we think it’s useful for people who use other blogging tools, as well.

If you use Typepad, be sure to get the widget. Welcome, Typepad bloggers!

In SquidU’s discussion forum, lensmasters frequently hold up their lenses for feedback from the growing community. And more often than not, other lensmasters weigh in with their feedback, ideas and responses to the lenses in question. Awhile ago, the Squidoo team decided to “formalize” that feedback process by organizing a dedicated group of active lensmasters willing to offer their insights on a given lens: the Lensmaster Review Board.

Today, we introduced the first group analysis of a lens — an online roundtable discussion of one lensmaster’s resume lens. This kind of personal lens is one that every lensmaster could — and perhaps should — consider building. And we wanted to launch the project with some universally relevant tips and tactics.

Special thanks to the participating lensmasters: Ray Daly, Heather Harris, Cyndi Lavin, Linda Moran and Dave Pye.

We’ll continue to offer similar group-led reviews — and introduce additional Board participants — as Squidoo develops.

And if you’d like group feedback on your lens, be sure to ask for input!

I think we just received our first Squidoo-inspired poem. A reader named Ed sent in the following:

Day to day there’s much to do
waking up to a morning brew

Good to know other points of view
and read it on your Squidoo so true

I love the idea of Squidoo-inspired couplets. Following this format, what other poems — two rhyming couplets — would folks like to share?

Email me your poems.