Squidblog

Sometimes we’re so eager to get a new feature into the wild that a bug manages to sneak its way past our initial testing. That happened tonight, preventing lensmasters from logging in or accessing their accounts for about 10 minutes.

For those that were affected, I apologize for the scare. Your accounts are just fine, and you should now be able to login.

We’ve come a long way since opening our doors (and signup pages) a little over two years ago. After Seth posted his SquidUpdate, I couldn’t help but think about all the trials and tribulations we’ve gone through.

With that in mind, I put together a lens on how we built Squidoo, from an engineer’s perspective. It gets a little geeky at times, but I’m hoping it’ll still make for an interesting read even if you’re part of the 99.999% of the population who knows that LAMP is something you turn on when it gets dark.

P.S. Squidoo has big plans for the future, and we’re looking for a super talented developer to help us make magic happen. If you know someone who might be a good fit, there’s even a $3,000 bounty for helping us find the right match. We’ve got all the details on our job listing lens.

We’re doing some 2007 accounting on this end today. You know, preparing for the taxman and all.

And wow are there a lot of lensmasters earning a lot of money on Squidoo. I mean, I see the numbers every month, but when you add it all up and see what people are earning for an entire year… it gets a lot more real. We’re not just talking $5 here and $10 there anymore. We’re talking hundreds of dollars a month, thousands of dollars a year.

What’s cool is the recipe for earning: lots of lenses + niche topics + personal recommendations and opinions. Quality and quantity, which is pretty hard to game or cheat.

This means that accounts with lots of junky lenses aren’t cashing out (and in most cases, are pretty invisible). This also means that lensmasters with only 3 or 4 lenses aren’t exactly rolling in dough either, though there are a few exceptions.

So who are the cash cows? The people with, say, 50 or so lenses (Giant Squids, anyone?) that each go deep on a single topic and share personal insights and opinions about it. Sound hard? The good news is that making lenses on Squidoo is an art, and once you learn it, you can scale it easily and quickly.

Maybe it’s not such a crazy idea to set aside 20 minutes a day to update your existing lenses and make a few dozen new ones. The pages you make will start to pay off, month in and month out. For you or for charity. And let me tell you: it adds up.

What’s your next lens going to be about? Your cat, the book you’re reading, the movie you just saw, the people who inspire you?

P.S. To the lensmasters who noticed a weird dashboard note about 1099s today… sorry for the glitch! And thanks for hanging in.

Last month Seth posted an ebook about traffic.

The ebook says that the secret to getting (deserving) traffic online is actually, and always, about the content.

No surprise, right? Insert eyeroll here? Not so fast.

First, it’s great news. It’s great news because for the foreseeable future, the secret of getting tons of organic web traffic has NOTHING TO DO with who you know or how much money you have or what ads you can run. It revolves around a simple truth: great pages get more traffic.

Second, it’s helpful to outline and remind ourselves what great content looks and feels like. You would be surprised by how many people still think “content” is just article-length posts or stories or reviews. Of course, it goes way beyond text — it could be photos and videos and collections of useful links or annotated bestseller lists that don’t exist anywhere else. But think about this: content also goes beyond single authorship. If you run debates on your page, invite your readers to vote in polls or talk in comments or submit their own favorite links or books or photos to a list, what you get out of that collaboration is… you got it… great, useful, constantly updated, and yes, unique content. We call it UUU. And you didn’t have to do all the hard work yourself.

ANYway… the ebook has gotten an awful lot of downloads in the last month, and maybe I’m looking for castles in the clouds here, but recently I’ve noticed that the new people showing up at Squidoo are starting to make better lenses, sooner, and faster than ever before.

Seems to me like this content thing is worth your while.

(Click here to start PDF download of the ebook. Wait 15 minutes after eating before getting in the water.)

TechCrunch may have the honor of being sandwiched between YouPorn and DakeHookup.com, but Squidoo gets to snuggle up with eBay (StumbleUpon) and the 12 year olds (webkinz.com).

Squidoo is on Compete’s new list of Fastest Moving Sites: December 2006 to December 2007.

The # 14 fastest growing site in the world, to be exact.

Lensmasters, be sure to raise a glass to all your hard work. I sure am.

P.S. To any webkinzers out there… no hard feelings, ‘kay?

I was up late last night doing some research on a candidate and got to thinking: I wonder whether Squidoo lensmasters, as a body, are leaning toward one candidate or another. Can I suss out a political trend here?

The data isn’t very conclusive (I didn’t think it would be), though it’s an interesting journey.

Headcount: I started with a simple look at numbers of lenses. There are more lenses about Clinton and Obama than any other candidates. Next up is Ron Paul, then John Edwards, trailed by Romney and Huckabee. McCain isn’t widely represented on the site, which I count as a disappointment. Then there’s Giuliani who hardly has any lenses at all. It’s worth mentioning, too, that Fred Thompson has a decent number of lenses, but a few are about his movies, so I’m discounting those.

Rank: Next I looked at LensRank… if that decided the election then Huckabee would win faster than he could say Merry Christmas in December–there’s a really comprehensive, widely favorited lens on him ranked #9 out of the entire site of nearly 400,000 lenses.

Here’s a list of the top-ranked lenses right now on each the frontrunner candidates. (Note 1: the rankings change daily. Note 2: These aren’t necessarily “editorially” the best — they’re just top of our rankings which factor in things like traffic and rating and comments and clickouts and freshness and more).

Clinton: http://www.squidoo.com/who-is-hillary-clinton
Colbert: http://www.squidoo.com/StephenColbertforPresident — Wait how did that get in there?
Edwards: http://www.squidoo.com/presidentjohnedwards
Giuliani: http://www.squidoo.com/RudyWGiuliani
Huckabee: http://www.squidoo.com/2008-republican-presidential-candidate
McCain: http://www.squidoo.com/McCainforpresident
Obama: http://www.squidoo.com/barack-obama
Paul: http://www.squidoo.com/ron-paul-window-decal (Apparently buying a window decal is the best way to support Ron Paul. Maybe that’s how he managed to raise so much money?)
Romney: http://www.squidoo.com/mittmentum
Thompson: http://www.squidoo.com/FredThompsonMovies
Whoops, not that one, this one: http://www.squidoo.com/Fred-Thompson-President

Editorial: Finally, deciding to throw aside algorithms in favor of an editorial and anecdotal approach, I looked at things like depth and passion and degree of personal opinion in the content, figuring that could tell me more about how lensmasters are leaning. If lots of people are really fired up about Clinton, I thought, versus someone just phoning it in on a “what wikipedia says” lens about Giuliani, that might tell me something. No surprise, Obama fans are putting themselves out there more than others right now. Clinton lenses are probably the most divided between love and hate lenses. Romney’s the next most contested. Finally, content on the Edwards, McCain and Giuliani lenses are pretty darn thin by comparison to the rest. Same goes for the Ron Paul lenses, which is a shame for us given his whole “candidate 2.0″ background of courting social networks online.

Conclusion? Well, I can no more declare the Squidoo community decidedly liberal or conservative or libertarian, elephant or donkey or orangutan, than I can say that The Two Towers is a better movie than Star Wars. It’s obvious there’s no single candidate reigning on Squidoo… and that this is going to be a really, really close race.

Apart from political leanings, what IS clear to me is this. Candidate lenses that post personal opinions, tell stories, ask questions of their readers and run polls and Duels consistently outperform the more antiseptic bio lenses. If you’re looking for the most complete, factual dossier on a candidate, stop by CNN or wikipedia or the candidate’s own site (if you dare). If you’re looking for always-on updates and one-way pundit style writing, head over to the Huffington Post or similar. But if you’re looking to find out what real people think about an issue or candidate, and maybe even get into a conversation with them (beyond the “Lolz, I’d never vote for Billary” style of commentary you get on Facebook and Myspace) well then, Squidoo’s open waters should suit you best, IMHO.

In the true spirit of an election: go for a swim and decide for yourself. Better yet, set up your own “Why I Support So and So” signpost page. Hey, it’s better than sticking a poster on your front lawn!

Payday at Squidoo is always a good day.

First there are the hardworking lensmasters who cash out with hearts in their eyes, and send me notes like the one I got 5 minutes ago: “I still can’t believe Squidoo is free. You guys must be nuts, but in a good way I guess. LOL. I just got $310 from you guys, and that’s only one month’s worth! I would have made these lenses for nothing.”

Then, and even more thrilling, I get to mail out checks to nonprofit organizations that are changing the world — I mean really out there doing it, every single day.

Our Squidoo Charity Fund, which is entirely stocked by royalty donations from lensmasters, recently sent tens of thousands of dollars to these inspiring, upstanding orgs:

MyTwoFrontTeeth
Donors Choose
A Day of Hope
California Community Foundation
Steve’s Club
Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation

So, a loud and hearty thanks to the lensmasters who made that possible.

And a special thanks to 2 lensmasters, Doctor Kirsti Dyer and Christopher Scott, who totally, totally get that lenses are vital tools for fundraising and getting the word out.

Boy have we been busy.

Today marks the release of a major Squidoo update, the first of many to reflect a new focus on making Squidoo a fun platform for lensmasters to interact.

Introducing Squidcasting

The big news is a feature we call Squidcasting. We know how frustrating it is to burn the midnight oil completing a new lens or doing a major update to an existing one, only to resort to emailing friends one by one to brag about your hard work. With Squidcasting, now you have a way to send an update to all your fans at once.

Here’s how it works…

1. Go to your Dashboard and click the “Cast” link for your lens.
2. Type a short title and message to send to your fans.
3. Within minutes, your Squidcast gets transmitted.

Squidcasts are received by…

• Subscribers to your lens RSS feed.
• People who favorite your lens.
• People who join your fan club (more on this in just a second).

You can use Squidcasting to…

• Let your fans know that you’ve published a new lens or updated an existing one.
• Remind your fans of an upcoming newsworthy event.
• Announce the winner of a contest.
• Ask for help or coordinate a group effort.
• Many other possibilities—get creative!

Still curious? Learn more about Squidcasting.

So what’s a fan club?

Fan clubs are another exciting new feature. Just like favoriting a lens, fan clubs allow you to favorite a lensmaster. From then on you’ll receive Squidcasts on your My Favorites page from every lensmaster whose fan club you belong to.

But how will I find the time…

We’re betting Squidcasting and fan clubbing will keep you busy, so we’re inventing new ways to help make lensmastering a little bit easier. The first of these new enhancements is the ability to approve pending Guestbook and Duel comments straight from your Dashboard. You’ll still get notification emails (if you have them turned on), but this aggregate view makes comment approval a less tedious process.

What else?

We’re focusing much of our energy on making the Squidoo platform more stable. Today’s release includes over a dozen bug fixes, including some very annoying ones related to the Intro module. To make Squidoo fly, we’re also beefing up our servers and tweaking our code for maximum performance.

Finally, if you haven’t visited SquidU lately, you’re definitely missing out. Kimberly and Glen (both expert lensmasters) have been diligently adding new how-to articles to explain some of the finer points in mastering Squidoo. Just visit the SquidU homepage for a list of the latest articles in the Learning Library.

That’s about all for today’s SquidUpdate. Thanks for tuning in!