Squidoo.com and the Essence of Web 2.0

What Does Web 2.0 Mean for Your Online Business

For example, in a matter of moments I can add Amazon to my lens, along with Overstock.com, iPod tunes, YouTube, and Flickr, NetFlix, and hundreds of affiliate programs for supplemental retirement income.

This is great news for Baby Boomers who are adept at working a computer, but not so skilled at html or page building.

It is connect the dots. I can even donate the proceeds to charity if I choose.

The online community at Squidoo.com is as fun as the Site Build It online community in the forums and the general tenor of the place is gracious and respectful.

And then I decided to buy an e-book by Bob Jenkins, who is now an ex-teacher living in North Carolina who urges teachers to develop an online income so they can support themselves while they live out their classroom passion, much like what I urge Baby Boomers to do for their retirement, and on his site, I found a link to Seth Godin's book, Everybody is an Expert (About Something) and I was just blown away by the clarity of his ideas.

I hope you will read it, and go to Squidoo.com and publish your expertise.

From the book, which he gives permission to share.

"AN EXPERIMENT: A big experiment. It’s an exercise in amplifying the voices of people with something to say, at the same time that we build a community, a site that’s free to use, a co-op that pays royalties to its members, and a way to raise millions of dollars for charity—from New Orleans to Tanzania.

This is an ebook about a brand new online company and, more important, about a new sort of online tool that might very well change the way you discover (and publish) information.

For most of us, it’s not about the money at all—it’s about spreading our ideas.

FOUR QUESTIONS How do I get more traffic to my site? How do I find what I’m looking for on the web? Where are the experts? Can I be one? "LET’S SAY YOU JUST DISCOVERED ESPRESSO. For years and years, you were afraid to try it, sticking with herbal tea and the like, but one day, wrestling with boredom and hunger at O’Hare, you broke down and ordered a decaf latte at Starbucks.

And fell in love.

Now, you love espresso. You need it. All the time. But you really don’t want to spend your entire income at Starbucks, and you believe, deep down, that maybe it’s possible to make even better espresso at home.

So, you do the obvious thing. You go to Google. And you type in “buy espresso machine.” (*) [Throughout this ebook, whenever there’s a screen shot, click on the asterisk and you’ll get taken to the relevant page. I promise that you don’t have to see the screens to make the book understandable, but hey, they’re there if you need them.]

Of course, you’re not ready to buy an espresso machine right this second.

Even if the perfect machine at the perfect price from the right vendor appeared in a Google ad at the top of your screen, there’s no way on earth you’d buy that machine right now.

Right now, you’re just looking. You just want to learn about what’s going on.

So, you do your search and find way more than 820,000 matches (*). The first few are triumphs of Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

These sites sell espresso machines and have done a great job of getting listed high up in the Google results.

But that, of course, is not what you want. You don’t want to only see the listings of machines, not yet.

You want to understand what’s important, what matters, what’s worth it. Seeing the machines now is like shopping for a car before you know how to drive.

Without meaning, it’s a waste of time.

EVERYONE’S AN EXPERT (ON SOMETHING)

A few sites down the list, I found that Engadget.com, a site I know and trust, has an article. So you click on it.

It’s a pretty worthless article.

But you notice that there are literally hundreds of comments (*). You click and read a few.

The first few comments are worthless because they are unsubstantiated boasts from people you’ve never heard of.

But about five comments down, you discover a long, thoughtful post by someone who knows all about espresso machines.

Not everyone is seduced by rational textual argument, but you are, so you get excited. Finally! You’re starting to understand.

So you go to www.coffeegeek.com , which you find through another comment. Nirvana!

This is the site that should have been #1.

But alas, it’s disorganized and hard to follow. So you spend three hours (I’m not kidding, three hours) reading up on espresso.

Now you’re informed, you know what’s out there and you’ve read a few reviews of different machines.

Finally, you know enough to think about buying.

So you go back to your original Google search. And now you click on an ad. You look at that site for a while, hit Back, click on another ad. After you’ve clicked on six ads, you decide to go back to coffeegeek and buy a $1,400 espresso machine.

Did you know that those ads sell for about $5.50 (*) a click?

You clicked on six of them. That’s $33 Google earned because of your incessant clicking.

And you ended up buying somewhere else. Google deserves every penny, of course, because even though you didn’t buy anything, you were exactly the kind of prospect the advertisers were looking for. You just weren’t ready yet.

This is the best advertising the Web has to offer.

EVERYONE’S AN EXPERT (ON SOMETHING)

Congratulations. Now you understand how surfing the Web really works. You used to think that a magic search engine would find your answer and you’d be done.

Not so.

You found clues, you invested time, and you turned it into meaning.

Since 1994, Web 1.0 has been an ongoing effort to give you more (and better) clues.

Web 2.0 is about something else entirely." "This ebook has a pretty simple thesis:

I BELIEVE THAT WHEN YOU GO ONLINE, you don’t search. You don’t even find. Instead, you are usually on a quest to make sense.

That’s the goal of most visits to Google or Yahoo! or blogs or the Wikipedia.

How do you make sense of the noise that’s coming at you from all directions?

You won’t take action—you won’t buy something, book something, hire someone, or take a position on a political issue—until you’ve made sense of your options.

Think about the way you shop—online or in the real world. Unless the item is a staple or the store is quite familiar, it’s unlikely that you buy the very first option you come across.

Instead, you circle the store, putting off the salespeople (“I’m just browsing”), or you click around the Web, poking and exploring and searching until you understand your options.

You’re not seeking the answer at first—first you want to understand the meaning behind your choices.

Before you download that software or buy that product, you might want a better understanding of how a technology works.

Or you might want to find three or four choices for your budget before you book your hotel in London.

You might want to be more comfortable about the ways to persuade your school board not to ban a certain book, or you might want to know how Moby’s new album is coming along.

If this sounds a little like word of mouth, that should come as no surprise.

Not only does word of mouth give us confidence in a decision, it acts as a filter.

It gets rid of the extraneous and presents just the focused good stuff.

Sooner or later, you’ll figure out whatever it is you’re trying to understand.

Sooner or later, the picture will snap into focus, and then you’ll stop investing your time on researching the issue and take action instead.

After that, maybe you’ll take your newfound understanding and use it to teach and persuade others (after all, now you’re an expert).

Or maybe you’ll move on to discover something else. Searching online should really be called poking online.

Because that’s what you do. You poke around. You poke in Google or at Yahoo! and you poke at some ads. You’re not ready to take action, but you are willing to spend a few minutes poking.

After looking at a bunch of links and pages, then, finally, you get it. You understand enough to take action—to buy something or make a decision.

The thing is, this takes a long time.

The Web ought to accelerate and even replicate that word of mouth phenomenon that works so well in the real world.

The mistake: The engineers who built the Web believed that if they presented the “right” answer, intelligent humans would be pleased.

In fact, before you get it, before you discover the meaning, there is no right answer." The first version of the Web was about using computers to assemble clues.

IF YOU GO TO GOOGLE today and type in “seth”, it will present you with millions of “clues” as to who you might mean. (*) As I write this, more than 28 million pages are returned by Google’s vast index, and the right answer is in there somewhere.

The powerful Google algorithm, combined with the nearly instantaneous Google servers, put that information together in a heartbeat. And now it’s up to you to figure out the clues, to find the right page and be happy.

You could click on a few of the links on the first page of matches. You could click on some AdWords. Or you could reject Google’s hierarchy of pages and jump to page 32 of the countless pages of matches to see what’s there.

You could click on one of the matches, sniff that page, and perhaps click on some of the links on that page, and so on, for a long, long time.

It’s a lot of information and a lot of work. You don’t even realize that you perform this poking ritual almost every time you search, but you do.

Yet most of us don’t have the time and energy to do the detective work for more than a minute or two, which is why most Web searches fail.

Over time, users are realizing that their searches are not reaching their expectations, which is why the quest for a better way to search continues.

Google built a better clue machine and we raced to use it. If clues are what you need, then more is the answer. More clues, more links, more sites.

But what if there were a librarian you trusted? What if she had a desk near yours, or she was available on some instant messaging program, a click away, standing by, waiting to hear from you?

You could say, “Hey Sarah, there’s a reference on Scoble’s blog to a guy named Seth. Who’s that?”

And she would know. And she could tell you in two or three sentences, and the picture would snap into place and you could go back to work.

Because Sarah is trusted, and because she’s a person—a person who understands ideas and context and relevance, she could give you meaning far faster and with far more authority than a computer ever could.

The first version of the Web—the clue machine—continues to get better and faster and more complete.

The first version of the Web is, in essence, a miracle, something few people could have predicted even ten years ago.

But the first version of the Web is still focused on poking. It always will be.

It delivers matches, but it doesn’t deliver meaning." Meaning, yes searches do not deliver meaning. I supply that. The second version of the Web is about enabling people to share meaning.

IF YOU WANT TO KNOW how much tickets to The Odd Couple on Broadway are really worth, a quick search on eBay will let you know.

You’ll find dozens of sellers and hundreds of bidders, all working in a transparent way to determine the value of an item.

If you want to know one person’s perspective on the latest Washington scandal, that’s pretty easy to discover as well. Go visit her blog, and you can read all about it. You can read what she’s saying today, and with a little scrolling, compare it to what she said yesterday or last week. You can also read the TrackBacks and the comments and see what others are saying about her posts.

There are two things going on here:

The first is that people like to listen. They like to listen to people they agree with and to people they trust. They go online to hear what others have to say. You do this every day. So do I.

And the second is that people like to talk. This, of course, is no surprise to you, but it appears to have stumped the first generation of media conglomerates that have tried to control the conversation online.

People like to talk about what’s on their minds. People like to talk about the products they use.

They like to talk about the music on their iPods and the hotel they loved in Paris. They like to talk about celebrities and calamities and science and math and even brands of sneakers. It’s not trivia if it means something to you." I am going to stop quoting Mr. Godin's book here, and urge you to visit Frazzled Dad's Squidoo.com