I Sure hope this one was less controversial than the last one. The last time they changed the layout, a lot of lensmasters got really fired up about it… for about a week.

Change is good. It helps you keep perspective on things.

What i’m most excited about is finding out what the OTHER new feature HQ refers to in that post is… could be something very cool!

4 new Modules were released (SquidBlog) today, I think the two Amazon modules are especially worth taking a look at. Haven’t looked too close to see which of these are evergreen, if any. I’ll cover that in a post soon. These add to the recent Backtype module as well as a few others in the past few months. Keep ‘em comin HQ, I’m a fan!

Squidoo now has it’s on page on AllTop called Squidoorati. It shows the top 5 lenses of any category…except mine for some reason… Growwear broke the news about Squidoorati and Jaguar Julie added her take a bit later. Looks like it could be cool, but I’m not fully sold yet.

SquidBlog also announced Squidoo computer charity month today. Looks like yet another awesome idea for giving money to great causes.

BDKZ posted a great little tidbit on the ‘So You Want To Be A Giant Squid?‘ blog that gives a running timeline of important Squidoo events. If you ever wonder what came before, this is a great little primer.

That about sums up all the news I caught today. Did I miss anything?

I was looking at one of my lenses this morning and saw the following:

Lens 1:

Lens 2:

These are pre-populated ads for eBay and Shopzilla items in the sidebar of the Squidoo Lenses.

Why I’m a Pissed off Pirate:

There has been no indication from Squid HQ that they have set these ads up to be attributable directly to the lensmaster who owns the page.

The items and the content in the ads are in direct competition with a TON (over 300) lenses of mine that use the ebay module.

How can I click fraud an ebay item, Seth?

I’m not pissed off that Squidoo wants to monetize their lenses more effectively, far from it. In fact, I would love to split the revenue from those eBay and Shopzilla ads with Squidoo. I already do just that on many, many lenses. I would NOT like to split revenue on those ads with everyone on the site.

Why not? Because it is EASY to set those ads up to be directly attributable to the lens owner and not to the general ‘pool’.

Anything else is simply lazy. And laziness is the first sign of the end of the road.

The way that the system is currently set up takes a huge swipe at the most effective lensmasters on Squidoo (especially ones that make exceptional product review lenses, etc.) by taking revenue that can be attributed directly to them and distributing it to the entire site.

That’s not capitalism, that’s socialistic crap of the highest order.

The pathetic part is, Squidoo won’t make significantly more money because they will just be cannibalizing their own ebay sales most of the time. The only people it hurts are those that do a good job reviewing/promoting/talking about products that are sold on ebay, shopzilla ,etc (so, Everything).

Hurt the best lensmasters to reward the monkey-heads that can put 3 modules on a page, leave the defaults, and hit publish.

Way to go.

The Feed My Search module uses FeedMySearch.com to pull relevant news, blog posts, and search engine results into lenses. It works similar to the google blog search module which is also evergreen.

Uses -

I tried out the new module on some lenses I was making this weekend and had some mixed results. It seemed as if the module timed out about 40% of the time returning no results. However, when results were returned, I found the news and blog search results to be more relevant than the google Blog Search module.

Whenever squidoo gets new modules, I like to take them for a test drive to see how they perform. On several of the lenses I used the Feed My Search module on, they were indexed very quickly compared to other lenses I made this weekend (less than 24 hours for some). While the sample size was very small (I only made like 7 lenses this past weekend) I think that the initial results are promising.

I’m going to use Feed My Search going forward for the next few weeks and see how it does. If it seems to be performing well and has a minimum of timeouts, I may even go back and replace the hundreds of google Blog Search modules I have on my lenses. This is a big project though so I’m not going to undertake it lightly.

Have you seen any new modules lately? I try to keep an eye on the new module releases but I’ll be the first to say I miss them every once in a while. If you let me know about one I haven’t heard of I’ll credit you with the find and do a write-up / analysis of it.

New Week and New Modules, make some new lenses!

The ‘expert’ content creation space is definitely hitting the big time with google entering the market, but does Squidoo need to be worried besides watching what Google does? I don’t think so and here’s why:

Marketers vs. Academics –

As I browsed around the Knol site to get a feel for it, I came away with a very dry and almost sterile impression. I think Google’s definition of ‘expert’ is going to vary signficantly from Squidoo’s. By expert, I think Google is hoping to see academics and scientists writing position papers, similar to a peer review. This makes sense as Google is founded and run by very smart academic minded people so clearly the site is going to reflect those influences.

Conversely, Squidoo follows the mantra that everyone is an expert and everyone deserves a shot to talk about themselves, their business, their ideas and their opinions. While this can lead to a slightly less serious tone than what knol appears to be targeting, I think the result is that Squidoo is much less intimidating to build a page on.

Marketers 1, Academics 0

The Media Experience -

Squidoo allows you to add all kinds of feeds, videos, products, examples, data, charts, and other rich multimedia to help prove your case.

Knol doesn’t.

Community -

While many people are avid users of Google’s search engine as well as their Gmail platform, Google is still going to have to create a core group of die-hard early adopters to make the site work. This is harder to do than it looks but Google has done it in the past. If Google can in fact get a community together, their ability to scale may create a monster.

Right now, the money’s probably not good enough (Adsense only) for authors to leave Wikipedia or Squidoo for it (Yes, even though Wikipedia is free it still has massive mindshare and offers some power to its power users).

Customer Service -

It will be interesting to see if Google can provide the levels of service that the 6 people at Squidoo and the 15? or so at Wikipedia can with their gigantic workforce of thousands.. I doubt they can.

Inertia –

Google Knol still has to get through the Dip in order to really come out as a major player in this space. The more users that other ‘expert’ sites pick up, the harder this will be.

Summary –

Squidoo isn’t going anywhere. I do see Knol eventually filling a niche as something of an online peer review forum for academics and scientists which I think is actually sorely needed in that area. If Google really wanted to challenge Wikipedia and/or Squidoo for direct users, they would have allowed you to add a ton more media, integrated their social networks, and generally thrown a lot more resources at it.

What do you think? Fired Calamari or Squid Supreme?

Are you not an eBay powerseller? Don’t be discouraged! If you’ve ever bought or sold anything on eBay you are eligible to attempt the Challenge. Not an eBay member yet? Sign Up, look around and start creating lenses based on your first eBay experiences!

This is a fantastic opportunity to show users how to build high quality lenses reasonably quickly. I’ve decided that I’m going to participate in the challenge as well. Not only am I going to make the 10 lenses, I’m going to break down each lens every day and talk about the little things I do to help lenses get more traffic and succeed.

Hopefully this way I can give you folks some good tips to use with other eBay lenses or with your own affiliate programs.

You aren’t going to want to miss a single one of these so make sure and subscribe to my RSS feed (e-mail is available as well) here or by clicking the huge orange button at the top of the blog.

The Captain has decided that he is going to make a special offer to everyone that participates and completes the 10 day challenge.

Are you working on becoming a Giant Squid? Would you like to? Want some help getting there?

1. Follow along in the ten day challenge by building your own lenses each day.
2. Leave a comment here to say you are following along (and on each post each day with a link to your new lens if you wish).
3. I will personally mentor each lensmaster who completes the 10 day challenge for the next ten days, helping them to build 10 more ultra high quality lenses (that can make piles of $$ as well!).

Prediction

I bet there are less than 10 people that will take me up on this offer and be able to complete the initial 10 ebay lenses. However, for those that make it and what to learn exactly what it is I do, I’ll show you some extra sneaky tricks I’ve used to go from $300 a month from Squidoo to $2,000 a month since January .

Oh yea, and each person that makes it through building all 20 lenses over the next 20 days, I will write a personal letter of recommendation on your behalf to HQ to get you Giant Squid status.

Who’s in?

Now, this captain sails a fast ship but things are obviously moving at breakneck speed.

Hold on to the ride and we’ll see what works .

The last lensrank ranking change brought us a much heavier weight placed on traffic and less placed on having a single star rating. This shifted focus towards bringing traffic to your Squidoo lens, and it worked.

Traffic to Squidoo has increased at a healthy clip the last few months, and the top 10,000 spots in LensRank have become a pretty competitive place to be, and HQ has rewarded lensmasters that have gotten there.

It appears that the rules have changed again. After moving to some new servers, there have been some bugs to work out of the system and HQ has been working very hard to do that. After yesterday’s LensRank update, there also appeared to be another fundamental shift in the way LensRank is calculated. Some people had lenses rise up the rankings, some had lenses fall, and for some I’ve talked to, they haven’t noticed much affect.

Note: The next little bit is purely my own speculation. HQ hasn’t confirmed any of this, neither has anyone else in the Squidoo community. This is solely conclusions (probably incorrect) that were drawn from looking at trends and patterns I saw emerge from my 300+ lenses. So take it for what you will.

From what I can tell, there are at least 20 different factors that can affect Lensrank in some way, so reverse-engineering the algorithm is not something that I have the time or inclination to do.

What I’ve seen

There appears to have been an overall heavier weighting on some factors relating to ‘lens quality’ such as:

• Age of lens
• # of modules
• # of ratings
• # angel blessings

I think that Traffic has remained heavily weighted, but the ‘threshold’ for it may have risen. An example would be that instead of more than X visitors having a solid boost on your LensRank Y visitors was needed. I saw the rankings of a lot of lenses with 0-20 visits a week get jumbled all over the charts, but the ones with 50 visits or more a week stayed pretty strong.

Source of traffic may also play a role, but I haven’t dug deep enough to find that one out yet…

Dashboard commissions don’t seem to matter a whole lot either way..

In short, building quality lenses with content that people want to read will make you money. I know, shocking, right?

Maybe I should change my name to Captain Obvious…

This is a Visual Representation of the goings on in the Squidoo Chat Room. Stop by and say hi!

1) The Squidoo eBay module will be fine. Gil stated in the forums today that Squidoo has been working with eBay to make transition as painless as possible. Yay Gil!

2) Your RSS Feeds may need updating. If you are using a version of my Ebay RSS Feed Generator, don’t worry, I’ve got you covered and will be able to automatically update your feeds from my end. If you create your own CJ/eBay RSS feeds, you will need to go back and change each one according to the new links that eBay releases.

The Moral of the story? Use Squidoo’s Ebay feed generator…. or mine .

-The Captain