So I should build - and will build - lenses to my site and to topics I care about. Says Seth: “The structured nature of Web 2.0, combined with the folksonomy of tags, makes a lens the perfect middleman between the content and expertise you’ve already got, and the surfers you’ve never met.” He also suggests that there will be a landrush to the unique URLs (the first espresso site at Squidoo), but I think - or hope - that instead, there’ll be a competition among various lenses to be the best.
He suggests that this could be used by bloggers, celebrities, media outlets, politicians, and fans. The fear, of course, is spam I’ll be eager to hear how Seth plans to deal with that. So the hope is that people will be motivated to create lenses that make unlimited topics more accessible. Also, if you create a lens into your own site, you will bring in more traffic from people who know what they are getting into and looking for and you’ll likely improve your search-engine optimization (because, if you really do have the essential espresso starting point, it should rise high in the rankings). The business approach is what will make this work: You can go to Squidoo, once it’s up, to create a lens and if you do, you’ll benefit in a number of ways: Because it is a co-op, you will get revenue from the (very targeted, high-value) ads and commerce links that appear there. It’s open-source in the sense that he says you can create a lens without him he just wants to see more of them. Seth is taking both an open-source and a business approach to this. The original vision for (then The Mining Company) was another variant on this theme until it shifted to becoming a resource itself. The Open Directory Project tried to open that up but it was still too complicated because, as its founders have said, people are either lazy or liars. Yahoo tried to answer that in its birth but gave up because it very quickly became too expensive - to outlandishly ambitious - to have staffers catalogue the entire friggin’ web. But with the web’s size - with hundreds of thousands of links about any topic in any Google search - there’s no way to get started. He recognizes that now the web has to organize better around topics. This becomes a lens to Buzzmachine that I create. This could also be used for blogs how many times have you come across a new blog and wondered what this person is really about? This is why Seth had some of us submit what we think are our essential posts. He showed me an example about espresso machines (Jason will be interested) that points to what its author thinks are the best links and posts to get you going on your quest. Seth is creating a format for this and also an opportunity. I could create a new page that gives you what I think are the essential starting points for a topic I think I know. He calls it a lens and though you’ll be able to create these lenses on his Squidoo, he also is very clear that you can create a lens anywhere right now. So Seth is trying to create a new grammar for the essential introduction to whatever. The same is true for many web sites, including blogs. With most topics on the web, it has become too hard to find the right starting point. It’s a good idea because it’s a simple and necessary idea. He introduces the notion in an e-book (I still don’t understand his love affair with the form) but I got to see it on good, old-fashioned, no-download-needed, no-application-required paper. I got to see Seth Godin’s next big thing at Web 2.0: Squidoo.
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