The Internet is a strange place. Web 2.0 is even stranger as it combines all those things that where available before but in a fancy new easy to use way. When I first stumbled on Squidoo I was puzzled as to what it was. Its first page wasn't very informative as to what this is exactly, but it all looked very exciting indeed. At first I thought it was a light-hearted collaborative encyclopedia, then I thought it was a blogging platform, later on I found out that it had social networking functionalities. When I created an account it looked like a webpage building tool. In the end I realized that it is all that together and something more.Squidoo is totally free. You can create an account and start creating a webpage immediately. These pages are called lenses. Every lens is a single page with a coherent subject. As a lens master you build lenses about anything you like. You can have a lens about cars and another lens about gardening. in each of your lenses Squidoo will show some adds relevant to the subject of the page. The money generated from these ads can go to you, or to some charity, or to both. This is a novel idea since the platform provides you with a direct way of income without you having to do anything more than building great content and on top of that you can set the money to go directly to charities. You do not have to create an account with some online ads agency or try affiliate marketing. All is done through Squidoo. I am not suggesting that you can make a lot of money, or easily for that matter (such thing does not exist), but it is certainly a plus for the platform, especially for beginners.
In order to build your lens, Squidoo provides you with various tools and ready-made modules that you can add on your page. You can view your page and add modules wherever you like. These modules might be polls, simple text, photos, videos and more. You can later edit them or reorder them. Building a simple page is very easy as it all comes down to creating the content (writing the text, creating images, etc.) without any technicalities.
You can join special groups in Squidoo to make your lens known. These groups specialize in various areas such as computers or sports. In addition you can visit other people's lenses and write comments as well as have a guest book of your own. You build a profile that is used for your lenses where you can put anything you want; like photos, mini autobiography, etc.
The amazing thing with Squidoo is that it can be used to meet like-minded people with the same interests, write stuff that you are passionate about to inform other people, create a small income, learn stuff, do something creative and have fun along the way. Not bad for a web 2.0 platform.
