To Squidoo or not to Squidoo…

squidoo, websites

All Info About Diets & NutritionFor the past year I’ve been in love with Squidoo. I liked the way it was so easy to make a new page, or lens as they call it, and write about any subject I wanted. I loved the community there – mostly very friendly and supportive. This can be important when you’re working alone from home.

A friend and I have a website called Allinfoabout which has been live online since September 2001 and has gone through many design and other changes since then. Now it needs to be brought up to date. The old fashioned html pages just don’t look right now.

Physically and emotionally, I wasn’t in a good place at the end of the 2007 and the beginning of 2008 and couldn’t face doing it so I discovered the benefits of Squidoo at just the right time.

Now, though, I’ve come face to face with the downside. For some months I’ve been disturbed by the number of spammy lenses and more recently by blatant plagiarism indulged in by some lensmasters. Then there are the lenses that pretend to have content but it is minimal, mostly pulled via links from Wikipedia and overpowered by all the sales modules for Amazon, eBay, Zazzle and other affiliates.

There are some great lenses on Squidoo made by dedicated and gifted people. Some of them are as disturbed by all the trash as I am. In fact there have been threads in the forum about the problem. One thread attracted 165 replies and over 2200 views. Discussion in this thread was effectively stifled by a moderator who very subtlely implied this discussion was not welcome. That put an end to it as effectively as closing the thread to further posts would have done.

So I come to my original question – to Squidoo or not to Squidoo? Do I want to be associated with a network that allows these kind of lenses or webpages to go out under its name?

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7 Comments

7 Comments

  1. Ohme  •  Feb 17, 2009 @12:08 pm

    Oh me, Oh my! I just hate that you feel discouraged with Squidoo. I still love it and enjoy it. I do know what you are talking about and agree about some very poor quality lenses. There are almost 1 million lenses out there and I have seen a lot of very high quality ones. Recently I visited a number of new lensmasters and was amazed at how well they were written. I sure hope you will hang in there. I have faith in Squidoo and feel that something will be done soon to get rid of these lenses that give the company a bad name.

  2. Joan Adams  •  Feb 17, 2009 @2:42 pm

    Squidoo is fun, free, and profitable. Why would you choose not to Squidoo? I don’t understand, I guess.

  3. Stazjia  •  Feb 17, 2009 @3:03 pm

    Joan, there have been so many examples of blatant plagiarism found there. Whole lenses have entirely plagiarised content. Look at 3D-Tattoos on Squidoo (I refuse to give him a backlink) and you will see the entire content comes from http://mag.rankmytattoos.com/the-mystifying-3d-tattoo.html and the pictures from http://mag.rankmytattoos.com/twenty-trippy-3d-tattoos.html

    This is just one example.

    I’ve had my own work plagiarised in the past and I didn’t like it. In fact, I was on the case very fast to get it taken down. I reported this and nothing was done – the lens is still there.

    Free isn’t everything when principles are involved. There are great lensmasters on Squidoo doing brilliant work. The community is lovely. It’s such a shame that they won’t act on something that is actually illegal like plagiarism and that’s without mentioning all the outright spammy lenses.

  4. MiMi  •  Feb 17, 2009 @5:58 pm

    Stazjia, I know your frustration. I feel it, too. Hoping that these two problems (spam and plagiarism) are resolved, and have faith in Squidoo that it will be! Hang in there. Let’s don’t let the phonies and the junk win!

  5. Susanna  •  Feb 17, 2009 @10:42 pm

    I am reminded of a company called ‘Homestead’ in 1998 which went on an advertising spree and made simple modules for anyone to make “in 5 minutes”. Sure enough, soon a million appalling ‘websites’ were online. Homestead then sold for a nice juicy price. You can remind us what happened at About com. Ditto

    What’s the next step for squidoo?

  6. Stazjia  •  Feb 18, 2009 @4:18 pm

    About.com was bought by the New York Times in 2005 for somewhere in the region of $400 million – http://www.writenews.com/2005/031805_nytimes_about.htm . I don’t remember Homestead.

  7. AJ  •  Feb 18, 2009 @9:25 pm

    Oh Stazjia – I am so sorry you are feeling like this, but I really do understand why you feel this way because recently there have been times when I feel that way too. Last week I reported something that I saw on a lens that was to me unthinkable – it has not been removed.

    The Squidoo HQ Team is too small to deal with the number of lenses and the danger with recruiting more and more Volunteers is that you will get more people looking to take advantage of their position.

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