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 I updated some of the out of date news articles on there and added a lot more pictures – I got some good ones from Allposters.com.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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This is the banner that Janusz designed for my Squidoo Art & Design Group – a collection of lenses on these topics. I love it. It’s so understated and subtle. Janusz is such a good designer.

I’ve spent over an hour today working through lenses that had been submitted for membership of the group. There were some fabulous ones with great information and beautifully illustrated. Many of them are really inspiring.

What is annoying is that people submit their lenses without reading the criteria for acceptance. I specifically say that lenses must have original written content. Even so, earlier in the week somebody submitted several that consisted just of RSS feeds search results and affiliate ads which I rejected. He or she just resubmitted them all with no changes. I wrote and said why I’ve rejected them again.

It’s such a waste of time. Why don’t people read the information? Grrrr.