Squidblog

I’ve spent the last few days with my jaw on the floor, delighted by the cool response to our HeyMonkeyBrain project.

Enjoy the linkfest.

Just a few blog posts about HeyMonkeyBrain, from:

Geek Mom Mashup
Network Marketing And Beyond II
Basic Craft
Captain Squid
The Travelin’ Librarian
Open Source Photo
Wibble.co.za
Delib
SuzeMuse
Squidoocool

P.S. Next week is MonkeyWeek… I’ll pick 1 MonkeyBrain lens each day for Lens of the Day, so nominate your favorites!

Inc. magazine ran a pretty typical, unsurprising, late to the game “guess what, blogs are great” article this month.

With one small gem of an insight.

And that’s the realization that bloggers aren’t the only influentials online anymore. Lensmasters have arrived. And lensmaster-bloggers who do both are positively taking the cake.

“Pinder, [Bob Grewal's] Chatsworth, California, company, sells sleeves for laptop computers. Grewal sent a sample bag to Kate Trgovac, a marketing blogger who also has a passion for laptop bags, which she reviews on her site, Mynameiskate.ca. (She also maintains a page on Squidoo.com, a site that makes it easy for people to compile links from different sites on the Web.) After Trgovac wrote about the laptop sleeve on her Squidoo page, Pinder’s sales jumped 30 percent.”

The italics above are mine. The insight here is that the world still thinks of blogs as the lead story, and Squidoo lenses as the side dish, as the parenthetical. Which is GREAT news for you. (Or maybe I should say it in parentheses; guys, this is really great news for you).

Because not everyone is doing this. Because lensmaking isn’t ubiquitous yet. Because if you’re here, that means you have an edge on your competition, in a crowded web world where everyone else writing about your topic counts as competition.

And most importantly because, as the article above points out, Squidoo lenses work. They spread your story. They sell stuff. They get you clients. They earn royalties. They’re free and easy and a lot quicker than a blog. And you don’t have to restrain yourself to just one topic. Make 10 lenses, make 100, and really explore the full range of stuff that matters to you.

So if you have a lens already, a) hooray for you! b) don’t squander your lead c) make 10 more and link them together and d) the big win: set up a blog to point to all your lenses, and to help you launch the new ones you make.

Likewise, if you have a blog: a) I bet you wish you could get more readers, so b) make a lens on your topic and c) then make 10 more and d) link them together, post about them on your blog, and start getting found.

Enjoy your position as the new influential online. But hurry, because lensmaking won’t be a side dish, a parenthetical, for much longer.

(You’re welcome.)

“bdkz”, brainy and clever lensmaster that she is, started up a blog to showcase some of her favorite HeyMonkeyBrain arguments.

Cowabunga.

What are your favorite debates? What burns you up, what puts hearts in your eyes, what issue or throwdown are you going to unleash on the world?

While you’re at it, here are 5 tips for staging great monkeybrain arguments.

And your father smelled of elderberries! So there.

Check out our new project, HeyMonkeyBrain.com, a lightweight little debate site that packs a serious punch.

Mashable has a great writeup about it, and there are some neat conversations happening over on Digg.

HeyMonkeyBrain is a simple, free way to post an argument and invite your friends, colleagues (and nemeses) to join in. You can add links, books, videos and other tools to make your case, but the centerpiece of the page is a two-column thread of diverging views. Inspired in part by Scott Adams’ brilliant book and blog, in part by the presidential primary debates, and in part by the Flying Spaghetti Monster, HeyMonkeyBrain takes the long-standing tradition of online arguments and perfects them.

Start an argument about who you’re voting for in November, make a case for why NOT to buy the iPhone, sound off on global warming, rant about why Britney Spears is actually dumber than a dolphin. HeyMonkeyBrain puts you in charge of the debates that matter to you.

Better than comments on blogs, less Draconian and gated than Wikipedia, funnier than The Colbert Report without its writers, HeyMonkeyBrain isn’t just about picking a fight. It’s about championing opinion and passion, it’s about acknowledging that consensus is hard, it’s about sticking up for your beliefs and changing the web (and the world) a little bit every day. (And, oh yeah, you can raise money for charity along the way, just like all Squidoo pages).

Some may argue that this has been done before. The brilliant minds already running debates at HeyMonkeyBrain beg to differ. It’s never been this easy, this elegant or this persuasive. If you disagree, hey, you can always let us know.

Here are some great debates that are just getting started on HeyMonkeyBrain. Tell ‘em what you think. Or pick your own fight.

Audio books are better than radio.
Smoking should be banned in all public places.
Steve Jobs is an arrogant prick.
Tofu or Bacon: Which side are you on?
Zazzle beats the pants off CafePress
Paper or Plastic?
PHP or Rails?
Faith is more important than religion.
Vinyl is better than Digital.

Pow!

Tonight starting at 9pm EST we will be migrating all uploaded images to Amazon S3, a file storage service. This will help us keep costs down while also providing redundancy (if one photo server goes offline, we can easily bring another online in its place). Amazon S3 is proving to be a very reliable image hosting provider, and we’ll be following successful pioneers such as SmugMug and 37Signals.

During the migration you will not be able to upload photos or publish your lenses. All other site functionality (creating and editing lenses, lensrolling, squidcasting, etc) will not be affected by the migration. We’re expecting the entire process to take about 4 hours, and all functionality should be restored around 1am EST.

* Update: Our image migration is still underway, but image uploading is now re-enabled. Thanks for your patience!