Squidblog

Squidoo is donating $1000 to charity every day through Thanksgiving.

With a $5000 grand prize on Thanksgiving Day.

To enter and raise money (for free) for your favorite charity on our list, just make a foody lens. Great apple pie recipes, best locally grown squashes, tried and true baking secrets, best coffeemaker recommendations, your family’s Thanksgiving menu — anything and everything food or kitchen, it all goes.

Read up on the rules, then get started building.

When something is successful, there’s bound to be spinoffs. Bandwagoneers. Hangers-on. Maybe even copycats.

If you’re really successful, you’re also going to see the good side of this: Tools that leverage your platform, ebooks teaching people how to navigate it, blogs spotlighting the best of it, communities grouping up around it, and on and on and on.

A few years ago there was a tenacious business book called Brand Hijack, and it basically said that if you’re not willing to let people hijack the spirit of what you’ve created and make it their own, might as well get out of the kitchen.

So from a Squidoo standpoint, the more I see offshoots and satellite projects that are aiming to teach new lensmasters how to make great lenses, or inform and teach existing lensmasters in a way that adds value to the community, or offer a place for moms to meetup, or a suite of cool addons to help you run your lenses, I am delighted. And thrilled. And impressed by the generosity of so many lensmasters who want to teach and mentor and help.

There’s no stepping on toes if you’re fair and clear and useful and honest and deliver what you say you’re going to deliver.

Keep at it, guys. And thanks.

The new Giant Squid Challenge is a Ning community built especially for lensmasters who are ready to take their Squidoo skills to the next level.

Giant Squid lensmasters and 100 Club members receive oodles of perks that make their lensmaking experience faster and better.

Your Giant Squid Greeters and Organizers are on hand at the Giant Squid Challenge Ning to answer your questions, offer advice, and to give you an honest critique of your lenses.

There are groups that deal with specific lens building topics, tips to give you a leg up when it’s time to apply for Giant or the 100 Club, a weekly lens building challenge to help you reach that magic number of 50 or 100 awesome lenses, and a community of peers where everyone is working together to reach their goals, one lens at a time.

If you’re interested in becoming a Giant Squid lensmaster or are on your way to becoming a new 100 Club member, join us today!

Learn more about the new Giant Squid Challenge today!

PS - questions about becoming a Giant Squid? Learn more from RMS, your Giant Squid Mentor.

I promise not to speak in acronymns for the rest of this post!

We’ve got a few updates big and small for you Squids today, so I’ll get straight to it. Releasing in the next few hours:

1. As part of our Brands in Public project with BzzAgent, we’ll be running free house ads for all the earlybird brands that are participating. They’re run-of-site badges that we hope will help tell our Brands in Public story to some interested surfers and gain some exposure on behalf of our partner brands. Since these ads aren’t designed to monetize directly (like AdSense and Glam and InfoLinks) there is no ad pool for them. You’ll see the ads at the bottom of the righthand sidebar on lenses. We’ll run ‘em for 5 weeks and then we’ll take them off.

2. A new lens header, specifically the nav. This is a global change for all Squidoo pages and relies on good user interface standards that should make it easier for everyone to get around the site. Nothing you need to know or do, and there’s no new content being pushed into the header, it’s just getting reorganized.

3. A special test just for adventurous Giant Squids, coming soon. Stay tuned over on our secret blog for details…

4. This is a fun one for most lensmasters, based on the feedback we got from our preview last week. A new ‘what you see is what you get’ WYSIWYG text editor (to help you bold and link and style your text simply and quickly) and a new module editor overlay that is intended to create a cleaner experience in editing modules in your lens Workshops. For now, the WYSIWYG editor will be limited to the Introduction module so we can test it out together. If all goes well, it will be added to the rest of the modules. Both of these new features were previewed by Giant Squids, and it’s time to try them out on a wider scale.

The Rocketmoms project continues to be a rewarding experience for hundreds of creative moms looking for a simple place to write about their favorite topics, while connecting with other moms and friends.

Bonnie, our fearless lensmaster at the helm of Rocketmoms, shares news about what comes next. The highlights, straight from Bonnie to you…

RocketMoms “Try-It” Week: A one week intensive learning session for people who want to TRY RocketMoms. I know from personal experience that it’s intimidating to get people to try Squidoo. After all it’s new and there is a bit of a learning curve. So during this one week session I am going to help whoever joins up build and customize their first lens. From beginning to end I’ll be around all day to answer questions and guide people through the lens building process. This intensive seminar is a one of a kind opportunity to learn how to build one great lens, straight out of the chute. This event is designed for people to try Squidoo, RocketMoms-style, learn the ropes and see if it’s something they might enjoy.

The Rocketmoms Holiday Session: After Try-It Week, there’s a 6 week session of Rocketmoms, starting soon, focused on teaching you how to make (and make money from) Holiday lenses.

All details and dates over on the Rocketmoms blog.

Pretty cool that AddThis, the popular social sharing tool, recently added Squidoo to the mix.

Given that AddThis is on over 400,000 websites, that’s an awful lot of content that is easier than ever to share on your lens in just one click. And one of their cool new features is that the service remembers what sites you share to the most — so if you add links to your Squidoo lenses via AddThis, Squidoo will show up higher on your next visit to a website running AddThis.

Always nice to get a little extra love. Thanks, AddThis.

It’s not just a good way to live life.

What you see is what you get (also known as a WYSIWYG) is also a kind of text editor that makes writing online a little easier!

And at long last, we’ll be offering it in your Squidoo module editors. You’ll be able to quickly bold, resize, pick a few fonts, link sites, and all the basic fun stuff a standard WYSIWYG editor provides. Hopefully this will save you time spent tinkering with html and CSS hacks and will help get back to basics.

Check out a sneak peek.

You’ll see the WYSIWYG in your workshops soon, probably next week. We’ll also be experimenting with a new bigger “overlay” module editor, so you can see more of your content at once with less scrolling about. It should make for a smoother editing experience in the Workshop. We polled the Giant Squids on how they’d feel about it, and with good feedback in hand we’ll be trying the overlay out. If it’s not much loved, though, we’ll be listening and will have the ‘rollback’ button handy!

Today we launched a new project, Brands in Public.

Seth’s blog has a complete overview of what Brands in Public is all about.

From a Squidoo community perspective, it’s a satellite gig powered by Squidoo, sold by the smart people at BzzAgent, and created for your everyday consumer on the web who is looking for one easy spot to follow the latest conversations about her favorite brand.

It’s something different from our usual ‘front door to Squidoo’ projects like SquidWho and SquidBoo and SquidLit. If you were to think of Squidoo as a U2 album, our front door projects are each cool tracks on the same album. Whereas Brands in Public is more like what happens when Bono goes off and sings with Bob Geldof for a special event.

For lensmasters, a few things you might like to know about it are:

• It’s run on the Squidoo platform.
• We built it because we think it’s filling an important spot on the web and creating a simple social opportunity for brands.
• I invited a few dozen early Giant Squids to help build out the first Brands in Public (BIPs) and if those sell, we’re paying them a bounty.
• No, it’s not wide open for anyone to come and build a BIP, for free, like Squidoo is.
• Yes, they cost $400/month and BzzAgent is selling them to brand managers across the globe.
• Yes, you should tell your favorite brands about it.
• We’re offering free BIPs to chosen charities. If your non-profit organization is interested, please fill out this form.
• Lensmasters can (and should!) keep making regular lenses all about their favorite brands and products and services and debates; you don’t need a BIP page to do that. Not by a long shot.
• It’s very cool that when you Google “Molson” now, their BIP shows on the first page. (They’re one of our beta brands).
• Yes, Squidoo and our community is our main focus, always was and always is.

Step aside, Santa. Freddy and Jason and Jack the Ripper are showing you up.

We’ve discovered that tons of people come to Squidoo every year looking for Halloween stuff. Costumes, recipes, party ideas, jokes, scary movies, proton packs, DIY wizard wands…

So we put together the little SquidBOO project for you. It’s half party trick (and fun theme for your lenses), half serious way to aggregate great Halloween content for the hordes of people who go looking for it. The ultimate Halloween index, if you will.

What’s more: Your fearless fellow lensmaster Bonnie is running a neat blog and Twitter project to help promote great SquidBOO lenses, every day, from now all the way through Halloween. Check out her SquidBOO Blast Blog and Twitter profile and find out how to submit your SquidBOO lenses.

Ghoulish.

A fine looking chart: