My little dog, Henry, a cavalier King Charles spaniel, wanted to write his biography and include some of his opinions in it. We decided the best place for him to do this was on Squidoo as a lens.

The result is Henry’s Biography: A Small Dog’s Tale. Outwardly, he’s a very sweet, lovable dog but, reading this, we find out he has his acerbic side and quite a sharp tongue.

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I’ve always liked poetry, even as a child. That’s why I decided to make a lens called Classic Funny Poems for Kids. I included poems like The Jumblies, Matilda Told Such Dreadful Lies and A Naughty Little Comet.

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For 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?

For the very first time since I joined Squidoo, I’ve bought a lens. It’s about dolphins, one of my favourite animals, and it was transferred yesterday.

The transfer was so easy and quick which was a relief because I was expecting it to be time consuming and difficult. All I did yesterday was to remove the affiliate advertising. I haven’t replaced any of the personal affiliates with my own yet. I’ll do that later in the week or next week maybe.

Today I spent about four hours working on it. I updated some of the out of date news articles on there and added a lot more pictures – I got some good ones from Allposters.com. I don’t make many sales but the commission is between 25% to 30% so at least it’s a significant amount when a poster does sell. The main reason I use them, though, is that there are so many posters on such a huge variety of subjects, they are brilliant for illustrating web pages.

I took  the basic facts about dolphins out of the introduction and put them in their own module. I then wrote a proper introduction to the subject touching of some of the issues affecting dolphins and discussing our relationship with them.

I hope this lens is going to be successful because their conservation and protection is a subject about which I feel passionate. In fact, I’m passionate about conserving wildlife generally and, by that, I mean keeping them in their own natural habitats, not in a zoo or other artificial environment.

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Art and Design Group

I run an Art and Design Group on Squidoo. I clearly set out the criteria for membership right at the top of the page. A lens must have relevant content and not be just copied from Wikipedia and it should be well illustrated.  It mustn’t be just a prolonged plug  for a Clickbank product.

This doesn’t seem difficult to understand but so many people either don’t understand or they don’t bother to read the criteria.

Over the last week I’ve looked at about a dozen lenses that have applied to join the group. Most of them had very little or nothing at all to do with art or design. The lensmasters  must have thought that, because they had some pictures on them, they automatically qualified. Others were just plugging their Zazzle stores where they were selling stuff with designs they had done themselves. In some cases, this would be fair enough. Unfortunately, the ones I’ve seen recently have all been very derivative. They have also done two or three designs, then shown what seems like an endless list of products, all using these same few designs on them.

Having said all that, there are some great lenses in the group. Take a look at this one, Cheryl Craig, Aboriginal Artist to see some great art  by an artist who is descended from the Wiradjuri people in Australia.

Now have a look at these brilliant chess sets, designed and sculpted by Frankie, the lensmaster who has written about them. Then there is The Louvre: Essential, Little Known Tourist Tips which was chosen as Lens of the Day last year. The lensmaster, Margo Arrowsmith, uses her personal experience to give prospective visitors to the Louvre tips for getting the most out of their visit.

There are also several tutorials on different techniques. You can go through step by step instructions on drawing birds complete with detailed feathers using coloured pencils or doing an airbrush drawing of a wolf.

These are just a few of the brilliant lenses in the Art and Design Group. It’s obvious that some people who apply to join, not only do not read the criteria for membership but don’t even bother to check out any of the lenses or they would see that their own were not acceptable.