Squidblog

When we started Squidoo, the mission was all about needles, haystacks and meaning.

Google is great at giving you a haystack of matches on any topic known to man. But then what? How do you decide what to buy or visit or read?

Squidoo empowers experts of all stripes (read: passionate people) to stand up and give surfers that meaning. Whether you’re pumped up about recombinant DNA or fine art or restaurants in Queens, Squidoo lets real people stand up and teach.

And it worked. And it’s working.

More than half a million (let me write that out: 500,000) pages later, we’ve established that the world very much wants a free and easy place to speak up. And with more than 15,000,000 visits a month, we’ve found that the world also very much wants a place to find the meaning that Squidoo can provide.

So, what do you do for an encore? How do we take this incredible foundation of smart, passionate people (and thoughtful, well-expressed ideas) and take it to the next level?

Enter Squidoo 2.0.

“Who do you know,” is often is the wrong question.

Who do you know is a fun reason to fool around on Facebook, but once you have 914 friends, then what?

The right question is, “What do you know?”

And another one, “Do the right people know that you know that?”

If Facebook is about collecting networks of friends, and if Twitter is about following micro-updates, then Squidoo is becoming a place where people can stand up because they know something. People can stand up and be followed.

We talk about these groups of interested followers as “tribes.” Tribes of people who want to interact with each other and with a leader about an idea. Tribes of people who want to make progress, to learn, to shop or to teach.

Core Principles

We at Squidoo believe that the web works best when it’s open.

We believe that your opinion is just as valuable as someone else’s. (And more, because it’s yours).

We believe we can’t possibly know more than you do, so we trust you to speak your mind, share your ideas and check your facts.

We believe in being authentic, doing good, partnering with our community and being kind.

And we still believe (of course) in the power of recommendation.

The long tail works. We can’t predict in advance who’s going to create a masterpiece, who’s going to build a tribe, who’s going to make a difference. What we can do is highlight the winners and make it easy for you to find what you’re looking for.

It’s our job at Squidoo to give you a reliable, fun, ever-evolving platform for publishing your passions. We’re here to help you get started, put you in charge, give you a megaphone, and then get out of your way.

The wheat, the chaff and search

It’s also our job to reward the very best, to separate the good actors from those who aren’t contributing, and to make junk invisible. More than a quarter of the pages on Squidoo are invisible. We work with search engines and spiders to ensure that our best stuff gets seen… and the rest is hidden. The search engines don’t see those pages because we’ve marked them as being works in progress, as being under-developed and needing work. Which leaves us, and our community and Squidoo surfers, a lot of room to focus on the good stuff.

Most importantly, though, it’s our job to make it easy for people to stand up for something they believe in and then connect with readers and with each other. We believe the future lies in tribes of people that self-organize around an idea.

If you can place a stake in the ground and say, “This is what I think or like or recommend or believe” you’re more likely to find real friends, real interactions, and not just people who were in your contacts folder or who share a town or job title with you. Tribes built on interest and expertise and ideas are seductive, powerful and long-lasting.

How to Build a Tribe

If you want a tribe, you need to earn one. You earn one by being the best in the world at what you do, by sharing generously, by being clear and clean and transparent and easy to work with. The masterpiece lenses on Squidoo have organically generated a following. You can too.

The only way we can make that happen, all of it, is to be open, to give you tools and to trust you. The current generation of the best Squidoo pages–the ones that rank high, get traffic and generate income–are the sort of thing that you want to visit, follow, and be part of.

It’s not particularly difficult to imagine the benefits that you’ll get when you have a tribe of people who like each other and trust you. When you have a blog and a Squidoo lens and a Facebook group and a network of people waiting to hear from you. That’s your tribe. You–and your ideas–are the glue, the magnetic attraction, the purpose. Now it’s time to sync them all up.

So that’s where we are, and that’s where we’re going.

If you run a small business or a charity or work on a major brand or are a stay at home mom, your entire world changes once you have a tribe to lead. A group of people who want to interact with each other and with you to discover new ideas and to contribute what they know.

To all our lensmasters: thanks for making Squidoo the most popular, smartest, and friendliest knowledge platform and community on the web. We’ve got some big stuff in the works just for you, launching in the next 8 weeks. Keep an eye out.