Squidoo.com is a social media community created by Seth Godin (UI Simplicity Guru for those who don’t know) that is built around “lenses” which are easy to build, one page topic sites within the Squidoo community. Squidoo is different from Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace because you can create a series of lenses (pages) that is a different topic on each and relate them to each other, off site content and your profile. It’s kind of like a hosted blog, but easier to get going and, well, different. There are lots of good tips, ranking capabilities and search capabilities. Squidoo boasts over 800,000 unique pages, but Google only shows 114,000 in a site:*.squidoo.com search which makes me wonder how well the site is crawled.

With Squidoo, you can:
- Create a profile. Like all social networks, you create a profile that tracks all of your lenses, comments, dollars and biographical info.
- Create a lens around a single topic. The lens is the primary way to post content on a specific topic. The page grows longer and longer as you add content. Content can be text, video or audio.
- Comment on the content on a lens. As a member of the community, you can comment on other people’s lenses.
- Add links to your lens that go to other lenses or off-site (does not use no-follow which could give you link value).
- Add advertising modules to your lens. Squidoo donates 5% of gross revenue to charity, keeps 45% for admin fees and gives you 50% of the revenue.
- Add feeds from other social media sites. Include feeds from your Twitter, Facebook and other accounts. This keeps the content on your lens fresh.
- Change the access level of sites that you browse. You can set your browsing level to sites that are G, G&PG, or G&PG&X.

Squidoo is pretty cool. If you are a prolific producer of content, if you are already writing extensive blogs or articles or just want another easy way to publish content - check out and join Squidoo. It’s fun!