September 30th saw the final deadline to make Squidoo Giant or a Giant 100 Clubber. The Wiwon Team did well and I think many of its members will qualify with either 50 or 100 lenses. They’ll know later this week. In the meantime, I know from experience, it’s quite worrying wondering if your lenses are good enough even though you hit the target number.

The members of my small coaching group have improved a lot over the course of the last 8 to 10 weeks. Some people’s work has changed enormously and for the better. Even though I was coaching them, I learned from them too. It’s always a learning experience to look at other people’s lenses or web pages. Sometimes you learn a new technique or an unusual way of using modules that you’ll find useful, sometimes you see what people do wrong and that teaches you something too.

Squidoo won’t be using the different challenge groups like Wiwon for the next round of people going for Giant or the 100 Club. Instead, it’s one big group run through the Ning Forum network.

It will be interesting to see how this will work. It appears to me as if there will be a lower ratio of mentors to prospective Giants or 100 Clubbers. I think many people benefited from the small groups last time because they got almost individual attention and help. I had just eight people in my coaching group, for example, so it was relatively easy for me to take a detailed look at every lens each person made and I had the time to give a detailed critique when necessary.

A lot of the Squids from Wiwon and other Challenge teams have said the think this kind of attention helped them enormously.

Well, we’ll see in January whether the new system works as well or maybe it will work even better.