Squidoo

Entrepreneur, marketer, author and blogger Seth Godin has a new project out in beta: Squidoo.

Here's Seth's elevator pitch on Squidoo, from an interview with e-consultancy:

Squidoo lets anyone build a simple, free web page that points to blogs, online stores, maps and other information on a single topic—any topic. Each page can contain insight, bullet points, links, products and pictures, and each page earns royalties for its creator or for charity.

Squidoo leverages the power of personal recommendation. The site will eventually host millions of handmade ‘lenses’, each a focused, useful guide to some area of expertise, some glimpse of the net. Instead of aimlessly poking, a lens lets a user see the big picture—a human being’s big picture, the overview you need to get the meaning of the idea.

And here's my take, after playing around with it for a little while. A "lens," in Squidoo-speak, is a site--basically a one-page portal--set up to accumulate information about a particular topic, with a very friendly interface for creation, assembly and editing. Prefab modules allow you to (for example) incorporate RSS feeds, link to books on Amazon, and so forth.

How easy is it? Well, with just some spare bytes that I had lying around the house, I was able to whomp this together in about half an hour:

Squidoo: Lenses: Knowledge Work: Analyze, Communicate, Share

Part wiki, part blog, part social network, with tagging baked in... I think this just might catch on.

• Squidoo
• Squidoo Blog
• Barry's Squidoo Lens on Knowledge Work