Q. What's Squidoo all about?

A. 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.

I really hope that the Squidoo concept succeeds. While search technology is getting better and better, I see the limitations of algorithmic search result from studying search engine optimization. The concept of passionate humans actually gathering, categorizing and organizing information for each other seems like a much more efficient way to do things in the long run. Not that search is going away, but take this example…

Imagine you are researching the life of Hunter S. Thompson. Would you rather go to Google or Yahoo, type in “Hunter S. Thompson” and then start mucking through the search results or go to a human created page that has links to all of the best information on the Web about Hunter S. Thompson? I am guessing you would prefer the latter, as would I. If someone has already done the difficult work for you, and you can benefit from it, why wouldn’t you take advantage of the situation?

Imagine how many people have done online research on the same subjects and have found the exact same quality, and not so quality, sites. Millions of people are out there gathering information online only to keep it for themselves and eventually discard it. Why not capture all of the effort to reduce the effort of other in the future?

Anyway, Seth is the man. Squidoo - keep on keepin’ on.