No Spam Here

Squidoo makes great efforts to stop spam, plagiarism, and other rule breaking lenses.

Inevitably, some do get through, though. Squidoo only has a small HQ staff and it’s impossible for them to catch all of these pages.

There certainly aren’t enough paid staff to check through all published lenses so they use filters to catch abusive language, spam, spambait, and pornographic subject matter. This is a less than perfect system and, of course, false positives do happen which then require review by a real person.

Continue Reading »

One person’s research might be another person’s plagiarism but really it should be more than a matter of opinion. The differences between the two should be obvious. It should also be obvious that someone hasn’t just done a straight rewrite of another’s material.

When I research for an article, online or off, I consult many  different sources. Usually I’ll look online first because that is quicker and easier but then I will consult reference books, either my own or in the library.

Continue Reading »

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?