Squidblog

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:

We’re all in a hurry when we’re surfing the web. We’re looking for something, an answer to a question (”is gorilla hair ground covering toxic to my dog?”) or better yet, meaning. Usually you have to put in a little time to snap right to what you want. Search, poke, back, hunt, look, back again, and on and on. Or if you’re like me you have no fewer than 89 tabs open in Firefox when you’re on a research mission.

In an attempt to help searchers get where they ultimately want to go, a little faster, we’re trying a new series of ‘greetboxes’ on Squidoo. The first series of greetbox experiments will only be visible to searchers (as in, people Googling or Yahooing or Binging). And only if you, the lensmaster, have selected to keep the ‘Discovery Tool‘ on your lens turned on. If so, the searcher will see the greetbox at the top of a lens, spotlighting good lenses related to her search. She can easily dismiss it if she’s already happy with where she’s landed. (The challenge to you is to make the latter part of that sentence true).

Here’s a static example.

So if you haven’t already, try turning the Discovery Tool on and give the searcher greetbox a shot. It’s a good traffic play. Because once your lens is participating, that means other participating lenses will also point back to yours from their greetboxes.

We’ll run a few slightly different versions of these boxes over the next few days to see what works best. Maybe together we can convince some of the searchers who fly by in a hurry to stop and smell some roses.

A lens, as you know, is a signpost. A page. A scrapbook. A magazine spread. A flyer online. An organized page full of information on a single topic. It can have videos and links and photos and text, as well as social participation from your readers in polls and Duels and TwitterLists and Guestbooks and Caption Contests and the like.

In an effort to help you organize the participation happening on your lens, to help your readers easily access the whole conversation in each module, and to help them in turn spread your lens onward and outward to more people, today we’re releasing a feature we call “Module Pages.”

Module Pages are standalone pages dedicated to only a handful of our most social modules. Each module page spotlights a single module, on its very own page, right “next to” your lens. Think of them like subpages to your lenses. Kind of how you can see a single blog post on a blog, on its own, and then navigate back to the main blog. Back and forth.

In execution, it’s as simple as us adding a “more” link to your active social modules. That more link takes the reader to your standalone module page. So, if you have 409 comments in your Guestbook, but don’t want to show them all on your lens (massively long webpages can take longer to load, and 400 comments can take up some serious real estate!), you can set your Guestbook to show only a few and then your reader will see a link: “See all 409 Comments.” That link takes her to your Module Page for that Guestbook. The reader can then easily scan all the comments at once, as well as tweet or Facebook or email or subscribe to that module. I guess you could call it micro-following.

On social modules where a “more” link doesn’t apply, we’ll run a “Share this module” button that prompts a reader to do the same outward spreading for that module… tweeting, emailing, stumbling, and so on.

Another example: Let’s say you’re using a Links Plexo as a Top 10 List. Now that Top 10 list can live on your lens, like it always has, as well as spotlighted on its very own Module Page. So if a reader loved the list and wanted to share it on Twitter, he can tweet it directly. Which in turn gets people back to your Module Page and your lens.

Last example: If your reader posted a comment in your Star Wars vs. Star Trek duel, he should be able to send that module on to his Facebook friends, instead of making them hunt for it in the middle of your 40 other modules on the lens. If someone clicks through and visits your Duel’s “Module Page” she’ll be able to quickly understand what is happening in that conversation, and can then browse the rest of your lens.

As you can see, the emphasis with this new feature is on spreading modules as souvenirs of your reader’s experience on your lens.

Extra considerations (and bonuses):

• Module Pages will have very clear navigation to take the reader back to the lens, and even better, to help them dig in to other parts of your lens.
• Module Pages will be wrapped in lots of good social triggers, so your readers will be prompted to share your module with other people (which brings new people back to your Module Page and to your lens).
• We’re running ads on Module Pages, which increases the ad pool, and increases your revenue.
• We have built in SEO considerations for this, so Google won’t hang up on duplicate content.
• Soon we’ll be working to widgetize your Module Pages, so that you (and your readers if you want) will be able to “grab” the module and post a widget for it on your blog or site or email.

Congratulations to the graduates of our first ever Giant Squid Summer School!

They worked their tails off for 8 weeks, each making 1 new lens a week in answer to creative writing challenges we threw out. More important, our Giants were able to meet each other in their own private forum, swap ideas, cheer each other on–and teach us a few things along the way, too!

We had a lot of fun seeing the clever stuff they produced. See who our 47 graduates are, and check out a few of their Summer School lenses!

P.S. Your Giant Squid Organizers will be running a neat Back to School project starting September 4th. It promises to be easy enough to participate in with just an hour a week, and challenging enough to make it worth your while! Stay tuned, Giants.

And thanks.

File under “coolest find of the day.”

Not long ago, lensmasters David Burton and Marta Nowicka noticed something special. They noticed that there are thousands and thousands of Squidoo lenses dedicated to sharing family-favorite recipes, and that many of them had been created from scratch by talented lensmasters.

So they set out to put together In the Kitchen with Squidoo — in free ebook form as well as paperback print form. “Created by Squidoo lensmasters for Squidoo lensmasters and everyone who loves good food!”

Yum.

What I love even more is this: that they took the initiative, collaborated with dozens of other leading lensmasters in an open and generous way, and published.

Sometimes publishing online means more than pressing a button. Sometimes it means making things happen.

Squidoo enthusiast Bonnie (BDKZ) has been running The RocketMoms project for the last few months. It’s a small, connected, motivated, invite-only program for moms on Squidoo.

I’m really proud of what they’ve accomplished together. Bonnie says: “This past session the RocketsMoms created over 600 stellar lenses that pushed the envelope on creativity and quaility. They also got to participate in roundtable discussions about building better lenses, getting more traffic, and time management. So if you or someone you know would benefit from a super fun, smart and motivated group of moms this is the place for you… or them.”

Typically, only existing Rocketmoms can nominate new Rocketmoms to join the program. ‘Friend bring a friend’ is a great way to keep the community focused, relevant and engaged.

We’re also opening just 10 extra ‘tickets’ to Session 3 of Rocketmoms for any moms who would like to apply. Even if you don’t know anyone currently in Rocketmoms. Even if you only have 1 or 2 lenses, but would like to learn how to do more and look forward to working with fellow moms. Even if you’re already a Squidoo pro and want to meet others of your caliber.

Session 3 starts on August 17th with some new faces, new tips and lessons, and a brand new set of challenges for Rocketmoms. If you’d like to snag one of the 10 extra spots, email rocketmoms@squidoo.com. Don’t tarry, spots fill up fast!

Hear from some happy Rocketmoms:

“I absolutely LOVE Rocket Moms.” — squidoo.com/lensmasters/Heather426

“RocketMoms has helped me to venture out of my comfort zone and broaden my horizons.” — squidoo.com/lensmasters/NaturalMommys

“I was very flattered to be invited to participate in RocketMoms. It has turned out to be one of the best decisions I’ve made.” — squidoo.com/lensmasters/Wysiwigs

“One of the biggest benefits to being a part of RocketMoms is the chance to work things out a lot quicker with help, support and tips from fellow lensmasters who have already worked out how to do something.” — squidoo.com/lensmasters/aj2008

“RocketMoms is a blast!” — squidoo.com/lensmasters/GrowWear

“I have gained so much from this experience! The assignments are always so intriguing and usually on something I would not have thought to try on my own.” — squidoo.com/lensmasters/BevsPaper