Squidblog

PoliticsCentral.com, the new brainchild of the folks at Pajamas Media, has teamed up with Squidoo to promote political change and to support an amazing charity. They’re asking you, and thousands of people like you, to create a lens on a political or social cause you care about. You’ll be supporting the Acumen Fund in its efforts to combat global poverty, and you’ll be helping to change politics as usual, one lens at a time.

Visit the PoliticsCentralHQ on Squidoo and add your voice to the conversation.

The Citizen Squids’ Shield

3 weeks ago, something very interesting happened.

At the same time that our tiny Squidoo team was racing to keep up with ever-increasing traffic and more lensmasters and new development (and of course bug squashing!), so too was our existing lensmaster community really starting to blow the doors open.

And we realized something. Hey, we said. Our team isn’t tiny… it’s huge. It’s a co-op. These lensmasters are smarter than we are, and we all have the same goals in mind.

So we created a collaboration project. An experiment in community collaborative development, if you must have a term for it.

We just call it The Citizen Squids.

And 5 of them: Damon, Angela, Travis, Matthew and Kimberly are racing along, outpacing us, pushing us, and astounding us.

The Citizen Squids have been thriving for 2 weeks now. They’re helping develop and test our huge new Groups feature, they’re helping to write some killer copy, and perhaps most impressively, they’re acting as mentors to new lensmasters. You want to know who runs SquidU.com — they do.

So why post about this now? Three reasons.

1. To give a big public nod of appreciation to our CitizenSquids.
2. To say that micromanaging and total centralization will only get you nowhere, fast.
3. To encourage anyone else out there to look at their own organizations and ask: How big is your team really? Who are the standout citizens in your community?

‘Cause they’re way smarter than you think.

Thanks so much to http://popurls.com for adding Squidoo’s Lens of the Day offerings to the list.

(Popurls, btw, is totally addictive and loads of fun).

That’s better than a stinkin Emmy!

Three cheers for popurls and LotD.

Professor Joe Tomaino at Pace has a nice piece about how teachers and leaders can build lenses. Find it here.

Katherine Tyrrell over at Making A Mark totally totally gets how blogs and lenses interact.

Your blog lets you go deep, over time. You develop your topic through years of work.

Your lens lets you get specific, quick. It lets you venture away from the stated purpose on your blog and try on new topics. Or a lens lets you build out the details behind your blog, and organize specific content for you and for others.

In so doing, your lenses become back doors onto your blog, for people who might not have known where to knock.

Every morning, when I arrive at Squidoo HQ, I wash my hands to cleanse my mitts of the morning commute. Right now, the team’s got a bottle of pine-scented soap from Williams-Sonoma sitting next to the kitchen sink, but I just learned about what could very well become the Official Soap of Squidoo.

SquidSoap

That’s right: SquidSoap. Not only is the bottle adorned with Squidoo’s characteristic orange icon, but the hand pump comes complete with an ink pad. When you push down to dispense the soap, you get a mark on the palm of your hand. You then, of course, need to wash it off.

You’ve got to get your hands dirty to get them clean, people!

(Thanks to lensmaster Tim Manners for the head’s up.)

As you might guess, most members of the Squidoo team have a soft spot in their heart for the giant squid.

We are in awe of the creature’s mystery, grace, and beauty. We also appreciate that it can hold its breath for a really long time — and that it can swim really, really deep. Heck, even Seth is only licensed to scuba dive at 60 feet. Giant squid have him beat something fierce!

It’s not often that a giant squid is caught on camera, much less actually captured, but in 2004, a team of Japanese scientists did just that. And for the first time ever, the images they took of the experience — and this denizen of the deep — will be aired on television.

Tune into the Discovery Channel on Saturday night for the program Giant Squid: Caught on Camera. You can see a giant squid. And you can rest assured that we’ll be watching, too.

Cassie is a dear friend… she’s about ten years old and has juvenile diabetes.

JDRF is one of Squidoo’s charities, and we just sent them a large check. Cassie’s note thanking us for our investment in research reminded me, in black and white, what we’re all working so hard on. When our percentage of lensmasters giving their proceeds goes up (which it does almost every day), it makes me glad we did this.

Thanks, guys, from Cassie.