Wikipedia Versus Squidoo

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Read my top posts or learn more about Michael Gray. Want more frequent updates follow me on Twitter. Thanks for visiting!

I’ve mentioned Squidoo here a few times, and if you aren’t playing with it I think it’s time you start. It’s starting to look more and more like Wikipedia’s little brother and you can still get in on the ground floor.

Seth recently noticed some lenses ranking and so does Megan Casey on the Squidoo blog. I have over 100 different lenses and I can tell you some them are absolutely seeing traffic and rankings. In my professional opinion we’re starting to see the authority score of the domain at work, just point a little external power at your lens and in many cases things fall right into place (this happens even with completely empty lenses). While some will clearly consider this parasite SEO I don’t see it as bad thing.

Now if you read the free eBook companion to Squidoo [PDF], which is pretty good by the way, you’ll get a better understanding of the vision of Squidoo. I like to think of it being very similar to Wikipedia in nature but without some of the annoying “problems” of Wikipedia. My number one complaint with Wikipedia is Wikiality (hat tip to oilman)

If you’ve got an opinion (which may or may not be true) you can go put it into Wikipedia. This is especially annoying if someone else has differing opinion you get into a debate and the three edit rule gets invoked (clever folks use multiple accounts and IP’s to invoke the three edit rule in their favor, but I digress). For example here’s a quote from the Wikipedia article on Long Island:

Bagel stores and delis are also extremely common. Many bagel stores are Jewish owned and approved as kosher. Long Island bagels are considered some of the best in the world. At least one (and often more than one) deli can be found in a town. Some are open very late.

While some bagel store on Long Island are owned by people who are Jewish, I highly doubt there was any data gathering done to prove or disprove this fact, and represents someone’s opinion. The fact that Long Island bagels are the best is true and a fact . For those of you who are curious it’s Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and Long Island, and it’s the water not the dough that gives it the unique taste. It’s the same reason pizza here tastes different and many say better here than anywhere in the world. With Wikiepedia we’re stuck with a democratic vision of the facts which quite often means one dumbed down and diluted to the point of being as compelling and exciting as a chunk of watery tofu. However with a Squidoo lens you can eliminate pesky outsiders interfering with your vision, you can be as cranky, cantankerous, and one sidely opinionated as you want. With a little on-site authority, some off site linking puffery and your on the way dominating the world, or at least the SERP’s with your vision and ideas.

3 Responses to “Wikipedia Versus Squidoo”

1. quadszilla Says:
   August 14th, 2006 at 6:03 pm

   Oh man! Do I want a good good Long Island Begal. I haven’t had one in 8 months.

   They don’t even know what bagels are here. And what they call pizza is nothing but wonder bread, cheap cheeze and katchup.

   Have you been to Grimaldi’s under the Brooklyn Bridge? That pizza rocks.

   The Jewish ownership percentage of deli’s or Bagel Shops in New York probably isn’t any higher than their ownership of any other type of business. There are more Jewish people in New York than in any other city in the world. That wiki is about as relevant as saying that many bagel shops sell Snapple.

   On Squidoo, the more I think about it the more I think it’s the most ingenius site started in a long time.

2. Michael Gray Says:
   August 14th, 2006 at 7:50 pm

   Nope haven’t been to Grimaldi’s but the best pizza is from a place right on the Queens Nassau border at place called J & S Pizza. It was sort of like a nuetral zone where all the drug dealers from queens got their pizza.

3. Aaron Pratt Says:
   August 15th, 2006 at 9:17 am

   Forget those, try Multipy: http://tagging.multiply.com/

   Multipy blogs do very well, but you forfit your ads to them. Not sure if they have an option to go it alone yet but their domain has trust, not that you will see me using them (other than the above test that will be deleted or used for something useful).