Squidblog

In June, Squidoo welcomed seven new charities that successfully completed the application process and have made a promise to work hard to promote themselves on Squidoo!

BuckHawk Center Animal Rescue
The BuckHawk Center is a nonprofit organization providing rescue, rehabilitation and adoption where possible for animals in need, located in Southern Missouri.
 

Paws Animal Kingdom
Giving a voice to animals all over the world.
 
 

Michael’s Way
Michael’s Way is to help the families of children with cancer to cope with the extraordinary non-medical expenses that come about as a direct result of the child’s illness.
 
 

Share Our Strength
Share Our Strength is the leading national organization working to end childhood hunger in America. We weave together a net of community groups, activists and food programs to catch every at-risk child and make sure no kid in America grows up hungry.
 

CAER Food Shelf
Community Aid Elk River (CAER) is a non-profit, community-based Christian organization, whose mission is to provide emergency food, clothing, furniture/household items, and limited financial assistance to needy families in and around Elk River, MN.
 

Athletes for a Cure
Athletes for a Cure is the sports fundraising initiative of the Prostate Cancer Foundation. We provide athletes in all sports a fundraising platform for any event they choose, anytime, anywhere.
 

Renaissance Entrepreneurship Center
Empowering people to achieve success since 1985, REC helps a diversity of present and potential small business owners in the Bay Area through business training, consulting, incubator services, support, network-building and more.

Starting right away, you can set your lenses to donate their earnings to one of these worthwhile causes, or create a new lens to show your support for them! In a month or so, check the Donations Module to help them earn even more.

Congratulations, and welcome!
~Kimberly
YOUR Charity Organizer on Squidoo

PS - not yet a sponsored charity? Learn about our criteria and apply here.

Charity Central is your one-stop-shop for all of Squidoo’s best resources for charities.

Stop by to find:
- links to helpful lenses
- tips on building a better lens
- short stories and photos from our charities
- a complete list of the charities we sponsor
- notes and news about upcoming events on Squidoo

If you have a short story or photo to share, we’d love to spotlight you on Charity Central. Just send your image and blurb to charity(at)squidoo.com. You could be our next famous charity!

PS - knowing how to make lenses can come in handy. SUPER handy. Spend just 15 minutes every day getting to know how Squidoo works. Soon you’ll be a lens building expert. Trust us, this is a skill you want to have!

There’s never been a more exciting time to become a Giant Squid.

Giant Squid Summer School is in full swing. Purple stars, those elusive magical marks of greatness–they are for Giants only. Giants get perks and chats and sneak peeks and seminars aplenty. Not to mention that much-coveted Giant Squid badges for their lenses.

Yeah. It’s good to be the king.

If you’ve got your 50 amazing lenses lined up and ready, remember to apply before end of day on June 30th! Here’s how.

There’s been a lot of debate lately about lens ratings and some upset feelings about lenses that are great - seriously great - having to be rated R because of their content.

We know where we’ve stood in the past regarding lens ratings. If something’s ok for a 6-year-old to view and repeat, it can be rated G. If it gets into swears, violence, or grown-up topics, it needs to be rated R.

Nonetheless, we’re always interested in what lensmasters think about what should be rated what, so we’ve put together a survey:

http://www.squidoo.com/lens-rating-survey

While we don’t have plans to change ratings right at this moment, other than do away with the X category, we’d like to see what you think.

Thanks for playing!

As I posted a few weeks ago, it’s time to update our old “min” lens design from the dark ages. It’s a few years old by this point, and for coding and debugging and style reasons, we’re upgrading it to the recently released new “max” design.

What does this mean? If you’re new to Squidoo and this sounds like gibberish, skip this post. It’s not going to change the way you build and publish and promote your lenses. Just keep on doing your thing.

If you’ve been around for a while and currently have a min lens, starting on Thursday it will inherit the max lens default style. In short: Min gets a facelift, and Max becomes what it was intended to be — the experimental choice for lensmasters who enjoy having the first mover advantage of trying out new stuff on their lenses going forward.

One caveat: For the sake of simple testing, the 2-week long experiment with ads will run on all lenses on the site, regardless of max or min status. (Unless you chose the charity opt-out setting, of course).

Here at Squidoo, Summer is a time for fun projects, new experiments, and working extra hard while everyone else is off frolicking at the beach.

If it feels like we’ve put a lot of new stuff in front of you in the last few weeks, it’s probably because we have! From a new max layout and more modules, to a suite of look&feel themes for your lenses; from purple stars and Giant Squid Summer School, to a new direction for spam and junk policies. And we’re not done yet. Not by a long shot.

This note is to give interested lensmasters a heads-up on what we’re doing next. Starting Sunday at midnight EST, we’re embarking on a 2 week experimentation with ads. Before the words are even out of my mouth (off my fingers?) I know many of you are groaning at the idea. Oh no, not ads!

I know, believe me. But here’s what we’re aiming for, and what I hope you’ll keep in mind when you see them.

We believe in investing in our community. We believe in giving you tools and platforms and connections for making terrific lenses that you enjoy and benefit from. If you’re here for the money, we want to help you make as much money as we can from your good work. For you or charity.

Now consider the circumstances. 2009 is not a terrific economy for advertising. Ads aren’t worth what they used to be. When that happens, the overall ad pool that lensmasters benefit from goes down. And unless you made it up with your directly attributable module sales (many of you do!), your royalties last month might have felt a little light in the pockets.

So here’s what we’re doing.

Over the next 2 weeks, we’re going to run some advertising tests to see if we can reach previous levels. To start, we’re going to try a new display ad unit at the top of lenses. It will run from Sunday at midnight EST for one week. We’ll watch numbers, and if they’re considerable, we’ll work on a way to design that spot even better. If the numbers aren’t worth it, for us or for you, we’ll take the ad down. And try something else the following week.

What this means is that 2 weeks from now we should be smarter about what (if any) new ad layout works better on lenses, while being very sensitive to maintaining the integrity of your content and continuing to create a good experience for you and your readers.

As always, if you’re not here for the money, consider changing your royalties 100% to charity. Then you can opt out of display ads on your lenses in one click.

Thanks for your patience.

Just wanted to let you know that you can now pick a theme and add it to all your lenses at once. In one click.

Oh, and you don’t have to publish your lenses in order for the theme to work. Just select a theme for the lens and voila: it instantly shows up.

This is what you’ll see in your Workshop:

Non-profits and I go way back. My first above minimum-wage job was as the executive director of a county-wide United Way. One thing that’s always on the mind of charities is money. How much we have, how much we need, and who to ask for a donation next.

Charities spend a lot of money asking people for more money. It’s traditional. It’s necessary. It’s in our blood. But what if you turned the tables a bit?

Just for a day or a week or a month, instead of spending money on tools to ask for more money, what if you put all your money into promoting all the good stuff you do? Instead of working only in order to generate more income, what if you put 110% of your energy into making sure everyone knew about the amazing things you’ve done? No strings, no requests. Just pure, unadulterated bragging.

Which do you think would attract more attention? One lens on why donors should send money, or 100 lenses that show off your last ten years of events and staff?

In fact, it wouldn’t really cost that much, since Squidoo is free. And you can earn money. Which means you’re really just getting paid to shamelessly promote yourself. It’s good clean fun that every charity can profit from.

This is a special Newsflash update for lensmasters. We’re making some significant Terms of Service and policy changes and wanted to send you a very early heads up about it. By now many of you should have gotten an email about these changes, and if you haven’t yet, stay tuned. Or just read this!

But first, the most important thing to know is this: 99% of you probably won’t ever even notice these policy changes! If you’re busy creating authentic, useful, unique lenses, you’re fine.

The next thing to know is: Take a deep breath. We won’t begin implementing these new policies until mid-July 2009, which means you’ve got more than a month to review and adjust. We’re also actively listening to feedback along the way.

We hope you’ll take a little time to read this so that you can keep thriving on Squidoo. For all the (not so gory) details, please read this one big overview page. It’s a supplement to our Squidoo Terms of Service and outlines everything you need to know.

Or, read on for a quick summary.

1. No Spam. This one’s not new, but it’s worth saying again.
It’s simple: given our pedigree, our point of view and our dyed-in-the-wool, we-will-never-change-our-mind conviction on this issue, spam is not okay at Squidoo. For a few years now we have had a very strict and enforced stance against spam. That’s staying the same, and if anything, getting even more rigorous. If you actively spam people with your Squidoo lenses (by email, in blog comments, by stalking and harassing people on Twitter, by tricking people with the content in your lenses, and more) we’ll lock your entire account. More on spam here and here.

2. No more X-rated or Porn lenses
If you came to Squidoo to create X-rated or pornographic content, the time has come to say farewell. I was particularly inspired by what Gina at Ning wrote about their decision to close down “the red light district” on their service. She posted: “We’re not discontinuing the Red Light District because we no longer believe in the freedom to create your own social network for anything as long as it’s legal. We do. Practically though, supporting adult networks no longer makes sense.”

For many of the same reasons, we’re removing X-rated lenses from Squidoo. Most significantly because:

1. X-rated content is unfortunately more attractive to spammers than to participatory readers and good content creators.
2. While such lenses tend to get decent traffic, they make practically no money for the community or the people who run them. Advertisers on our site also avoid these pages. It’s not a practical financial move to sustain these lenses any longer.
3. We get a disproportionate number of DMCA take down notices and spam reports
and various legal complaints about X-rated lenses. Our team is just too small to justify this added work, and we’d rather focus our spirit and energy on the good stuff.

Find out more about why we’re making this very hard decision, and what it means for your X-rated lenses. (Don’t panic! You can export your content and take it with you).

3. No Junk Topics from our “SquidDon’t” List
Lenses on free movie downloads. Toenail fungus cures. LoseBellyFatNow promotions. Reverse Phone Lookup 4U. Ugh. You know junk when you see it. And lots more examples from this not-at-all exhaustive list. Unfortunately, topics like these are overwhelmingly conditioned and proven to attract spammers. If a topic has displayed enough widespread trickery and spam and bad activity, we choose not to support it. If we find a lens on a SquidDon’t topic or something very similar to it, we’ll lock it. For good. Our best recommendation: Don’t bother with topics like these. There’s plenty of incredible stuff to write about and recommend online without having to go near the edges of what we’re got going here.

4. A new limit to prevent overly promotional lenses
Making a lens to promote or recommend something is a terrific endeavor. It’s a big part of why a lot of our people are here. But: Less is more! Sales lenses far too often turn into junk lenses, as described by the relentless number of outbound links to the same exact domain. Being overly promotional rarely works. “Buy here buy here buy here!” never does.

So to help you focus your lenses, and sell even better–and to help surfers find our pages more useful overall–we’re introducing a limit to the number of outbound links to the same domain that you can have on a lens. If you have more than 9 links to the SAME domain on a single lens, your lens could get locked. Of course you’ll be able to request a review, and we’ll also have plenty of domains that are whitelisted out of this (meaning, you can have as many outbound links to them as you like), as well as sites that are blacklisted (meaning, even a single link to that domain will get your lens locked). Please read all the important details on how this works.

What now? First, take a deep breath.
We won’t be flipping the switch on these new policies until July 20, 2009 or later. So you’ve got more than a month to review your lenses to make sure they’re playing by the rules.

In the meantime, here are 5 things you can do to get ready for these changes.
1. Read this Newsflash lens for all the scoop.
2. Ask some fellow lensmasters in this peer-driven forum! See if they’re willing to suggest changes or ideas for making sure your lens is filled with authentic, curated, useful content.
3. Review and edit your lenses to make any changes you think are needed according to our policy update. You’ve got over a month before we implement most of these new policies, so that should be plenty of time to do a quick review of your lenses, just to be sure! (Never hurts to brush up on some lenses, anyway).
4. If you have X-rated lenses with Adult content, or lenses focused on any of our spam or junk topics, you might consider saving yourself the hassle and just deleting them yourselves. If you go near the edges of what we’ve laid out here, chances are your lens will get locked and then deleted.
5. Last: If our policies have convinced you that Squidoo is no longer for you, you’re welcome to export your lens content and take it with you to use it somewhere else on the web. We don’t want anyone to lose content they worked hard on, even if it’s not in accordance with our policies, so we’re giving you this long heads-up period to save your lens and take it with you.

Lots more info on this lens.

Thanks for reading, and for caring about the spirit, community and infinite possibility that is Squidoo.

We’re doing some cleanup on the Orbitz module today, in order to move away from some busted code and to make the module directly revenue-bearing for lensmasters (instead of funding the ad pool).

This module hasn’t been winning any popularity contests, nor has it earned anyone more than a few bucks, but I’m hoping that this updated and much much simpler version will serve you better.

If you’re already using the Orbitz module on your lenses, you’ll notice it looks a little different now. Nothing to do, just FYI.

And if not, give it a shot. Try it on Travel lenses. If one of your readers books their travel through your lens, you get a royalty. Hey, your chances of that are better than winning that free trip to Hawaii, no?