Ad 1 - What good would a lens about me be? And there’s already a site with my best posts — It’s here. No, actually that’s not true. This blog doesn’t give you my publication list, my Ph.D. thesis, my CV, etc. So perhaps there IS a need for a lens about lil’ ol’ me. Though I doubt it.

Ad 2 - But on the Web I’ll hopefully find infos from sources I trust, e.g. reputable magazines. Not just someone who “claimed” squidoo.com/trustmeimaprofessional Also, with a wealth of sources I can try and get a “fair and balanced” overview [albeit we both know that that’s probably not the case, since too much information is just as bad as none at all].

Ad 3 - Here, in a way, I agree. We currently have a lot of distributed content being produced on dispersed sites. And we have the aggregators - your digg, slashdot, reddit, whatever. We have a lot of regurgitatiing, reblogging, digging, bookmarking, etc. The only other place I can think of where new and interesting content is developed by a large community of people is the one I mentioned - Wikipedia. (I don’t buy the “for free” part, though — blogger.com is free, so is Yahoo 360 and a whole host of others more).

All the technical squabbles aside, I think my main cristicism is that Squidoo doesn’t feel like a community effort. It feels like a school science fair, with a single nerd sitting in each booth with his pet beetles under a magnifying lens or with his collection of soda bottle tops. That, and the fact that Squidoo doesn’t tempt me to explore. So my TWO main criticisms are … (Google for “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition” for the logical conclusion to this paragraph).

So perhaps you can find a way to strengthen the community aspect — maybe with hosted discussion forums, a comments or feedback component? Also - there’s not always the one truth. So where would I go if I have a dissenting opinion about something? Somebody claims squidoo.com/daniels_an_idiot and fills it with lots of information about why I’m an idiot. I can set up a parallel lens squidoo.com/no_im_not but unless he links it in his “related lenses” (which he probably won’t, since he thinks I’m an idiot anyway), how would people find my counter-arguments?

I have three answers as to why you’d want to use Squidoo:

1. the world needs a lens about your blog. Your best posts. A place to start if I just found out about you. You could even list your favorite books, etc., as a service to those that admire your opinions.

2. Do a google search to try to compare skype with net2phone. You’ll find tons and tons of matches, but not one useful page (at least I didn’t.) But if someone built a lens on this, the answer would be right there.

3. Which leads to the proximity effect. Each lens is generating traffic… some have a lot. The net effect is that more people visit squidoo every day than gm.com or ford.com. If someone wants to put in the effort to customize and maintain a blog, more power to them. For everyone else, though, it feels like Squidoo offers a chance to stake a tiny piece of cyberspace, for free.

One last thing: 15 weeks after blogging started, blogs were pretty bad. I think our lensmasters are doing some great work given how young our site is.