New Squidoo widgets in the right hand column of the lens

Sometimes I’m so happy I’m one of the Giants on Squidoo because we get to test new widgets and other stuff that TPTB think will improve the overall look of lenses or the ease of making them. I’ve fallen in love with the latest ones: widgets that enable the lensmaster to add content to the right hand column. Before the advent of these widgets, we could only use a small portion of that column right at the top.

There are four different kinds of widgets: Amazon Spotlight, Featured Lenses, Squidcasts RSS, and Blogs RSS.

So far, I’ve only experimented with them on three or four lenses but I intend to work right through my lenses, adding appropriate widgets. For example, I think the best place to use the Blog RSS is on one of my Squidoo Tips lenses: Make a Reader Friendly Lens, Squidoo Lenses: Quickly and Efficiently, and Squidoo Lenses: Using Pictures Effectively. Considering that I mostly write about various aspects of Squidoo here, anybody who finds those three lenses worth reading, might like to read some of this blog too.

I think using the Amazon Spotlight in the right hand column is brilliant. It looks really good there without poking the visitor in the eye with the fact it’s an advertisement. To avoid highlighting that it’s trying to sell something, it should promote a product that is absolutely relevant to the subject of the lens. That way it looks like additional, useful information. I believe the same applies to links to lenses, they should be relevant to the topic of the lens too. The Squidcasts widget is an excellent way to highlight recent additions and improvements to a lens, particularly one that needs to be updated frequently because it’s a newsworthy subject.

So what’s the downside? The only one I could see is that we can only use three widgets on each lens, have only three links to featured lenses and I believe we can’t choose how many lines are included in the RSS.