Squidoo's Value to viewers

Over at Joel on Software’s the Business of Software forum*, Dan added a post to the long thread I started about Squidoo a couple of days ago that raised a really good question:

Now -- WHY would I, as a viewer, want to go to Squidoo to look for stuff?
And if there is no viewing audience, why bother to post there in the first place?

In a word, time. Like you, I get 1440 minutes a day and (probably) like you I have too many things to do, read, and think about to fit.

Anything that saves me time is worth my attention.

Case in point. I've been tossing around the concept "the Long Tail" lately. I dimly remember reading about it, thinking this was the other piece (besides the Internet) of why micro-ISV's are the Next Big Thing in the software industry and by extension the society I live in.

So, I go over to squidoo, and lo and behold, there's this lens: http://www.squidoo.com/longtail/

Written by Chris Anderson, the guy who wrote the original article (and Wired's Ed. in Chief), here are his 5 top picks of his posts on the subject, a feed of the latest posts on the subject, and 10 posts from other people Anderson thinks really expand on this idea.

This is really good quality knowledge. There has been a lot written and posted about the Long Tail, and from one single web page, I’ve got really good information.

By way of comparison, I'll go over to Google and search for "Long Tail":

-14.6 million hits.

-Anderson's article.

-Lots and Lots and Lots of relevant web site/blog hits. Google wins again. In fact, I could read the first 99 hits before I get to long-tail boats in Thailand, which isn't what I want.

99 hits? 99 web sites and blogs? By the time I'm done my brain, which I need for other things today like work, will be so crammed with long tail information I'll be lucky if I remember what I meant to do today, let alone have any time to do it!

And therein lies the value. I can get a really good start with one single squidoo lens or I can drown in relevant information. Which is an improvement over pre-Google Internet when I would drown in irrelevant information, but drowning is drowning.

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* I'm now co-Moderator of this major software business online community.

 

Comments

[Alex]

This post reminds me of why I use del.icio.us over google for a lot of my searches because of the great value that tags add to the quality of search results. Squidoo's lenses and del.icio.us are similar in that regard -- they both add a human touch to information retrieval.