I was surprised to see that a Squidoo lense for FriendFeed did not already exist, so I went ahead and created one. The lense is currently fairly basic. It has a brief description of what FriendFeed is, pulls in blog posts about FriendFeed from Google’s Blog Search, pulls in content from del.icio.us that is tagged with the keyword “friendfeed”, and finally has a list of all the social sharing sites with a short description that can be pulled into your friendfeed. I learned about some pretty cool social sites like Disqus, Tumblr, Jaiku, and Goodreads. Go check it out and tell me what you think. Definitely sign up for FriendFeed if you haven’t already.

Google has announced the very early stages of an online platform for the contribution of knowledge, similar to Seth Godin’s, Squidoo, launched back in 2005. Google’s new tool is called Knol, which stands for a unit of knowledge. Its goal is to allow authors to write articles on any topic in hopes that the article will become an authoritative resource of information. Each article will contain images, references, reviews, questions, and additional content.

While Knol’s model is extremely similar to Squidoo’s, it appears that Google is taking more a scholarly approach to the dissemination of information. Squidoo encourages any and all to create “lenses” about their passion, while it appears that Google is hoping that already established doctors, scientists, and authors will put their name on the line to give the “knol” authority from the start.

Godin appears to welcome the Big Gun into the space, stating in his blog “The nature of the Web, though, seems to be that because of the very openness of the system, imitation is the highest form of endorsement.”

Although, in response to Udi Manber’s posting about why Google is launching Knol ( “We believe that many do not share that knowledge today simply because it is not easy enough to do that.”), Godin did turn the sample knol into a Squidoo lense, stating “It didn’t take very long.”

Its hard to blame the guy for being a little perturbed. After all, Google will make sure that Knols more than sprinkles the search engine results, which will eventually cut into the growth of Squidoo. With that said, Godin is one of the smartest marketers/2.0 thinkers I have come across, and there is not doubt in my mind that he will give Google a run for their money.

Thoughts, comments, disagreements are all welcome…

The spammers on Squidoo have hit the trip wire, and Google has begun to penalize a lot of Squidoo pages. Jason Calanis cites a few examples of the spam.  We’re talking real -  free rington, porn, viagra - spam, not spam like my client creating information rich lenses, that could actually be useful to someone moving to Charlotte. Ed Dale’s blog TubbyNerd.com, sites several reasons for Google penalizing Squidoo’s ranking, non of which have anything to do with spamming.  Either way, Squidoo has lost a lot of its initial zazooo given to it by its high rankings on Google, so it appears it will be necessary to build some backlinks to your Squidoo pages if you want to see them rank.

Creating content specific pages on Squidoo is a great link building strategy for SEO. Squidoo is like a more intellectual, content driven version of Myspace that allows users to create pages on their passions consisting of “modules” of written content. The interface allows you to easily insert RSS feeds, Youtube videos, Flickr photos, products from Amazon and more. Creating useful Squidoo “lenses” on topics related to your website, and inserting strategic deeplinks occasionally is a great way to get quality backlinks.

We recently implemented a Squidoo link building campaign with one of our clients by creating lenses for all there major city markets, that focused on providing helpful information to people living in these cities or planning to move to them. Remember, the key is to provide useful relevant focused content on each lense. Don’t be an overt spammer… just a covert one If anyone has had experience using Squidoo for link building please share.