What the hell that means, I have no idea. I followed the link in Darren’s post about Squidoo coming out of private beta, and I had a spare 5 minutes so I thought I’d go see what it was all about. I kinda wish I hadn’t.

Squidoo is… erm… a website that lets you… er. Hmmm. OK, time to hit the FAQs. First one, is “What’s a lens?”

A lens is one person’s (lensmaster’s) view on a topic he cares about. More specifically, a lens is a single web page filled with information and links that point to other web pages, to continually updated RSS feeds, or to relevant advertising. It’s a place to start, not finish.

Still not much help. How about number 2: “Why should I build a lens?”

There are a few reasons to build your own lens:

No… that still ain’t helping. But I’m starting to realise why: it’s this whole “lens” thing. Just take a quick glance at the FAQs - and more importantly the places where they talk about lenses. We’ve got…

“Lensmaster”
“A popular lens gives credibility to the Lensmaster.”
“Lenses are totally free to make.”
“If you have a blog, a lens is a great way to highlight your best posts.”
“If you are a yo-yo expert, your lens could be nothing but links to tricks.”
“RSS feeds can automatically update your lens with select news stories.”
“If you are a podcaster, you should definitely have a lens.”
“If you are an entrepreneur, your lens on a popular topic could generate two or five or twenty dollars a day in clickthrough and affiliate income.”
“Modules are the building blocks of lenses.”
“Squidoo has thousands of starter lenses.”
“Then, we use an automated algorithm—LensRank—to rank the lenses.”
“www.squidu.com is where lensmasters learn to make better lenses.”

And so on, and so on. It’s confusing because they’re calling whatever it is you build with Squidoo a “lens”. Who’s gonna want to put the extra effort into working with all this new terminology for stuff that already exists?

When I say ‘already exists’, I want to point you back to the first FAQ - it says that a lens is “a single web page filled with information and links that point to other web pages, to continually updated RSS feeds, or to relevant advertising.”

Which basically means that it’s a blog, possibly albeit with some added content management features (which will probably soon be standard on other existing hosted blog packages anyway). I don’t get the point. Why create another blo… I mean ‘lens’ that points to the blog you already have?

And why do it at Squidoo where they take a cut of any advertising that appears on your Squidoo blo… I mean ‘lens’.

Actually, why create a new blog and then have to go through the ridiculous process of calling it a ‘lens’?

If for whatever reason you really need to run a hosted blog that points to your existing blog, why not use blogger.com, or wordpress.com. Or why not just leave this whole step out, and concentrate on building the your original blog in the first place?

Like I said, I just don’t get it.