Squidoo is...

The new service called Squidoo went live today, and after having a look around, my first question is:

“OK, what is this? Why is it cool?”

Here’s my take on it: Squidoo is in fact a collection of lenses on various subjects. These lenses are made by anyone who wants to make them, and they’re tagged, linked, and cross-linked in just about any way they can in order to make them easy to organize.

It’s cool because of what it’s trying to accomplish: a new structure for finding little bits of info. But there are problems, too. I think lenses like this should be more open. Maybe there are more options available and things just haven’t been explored yet, but every lens I’ve seen has been basically the same as a blog. There’s a few links (a blogroll) and a few posts, and you can subscribe to an RSS feed.

That’s blogging. The difference between Squidoo and Blogger seems to be that squidoo has a tag cloud as well as a search function.

To be fair, it’s a bit more than that. Squidoo is directed at organization, whereas blogger is just dedicated to making blogs happen. But I fear that Squidoo may become little more than a glorified collection of blogger profiles. Maybe if it were more like a wiki?