Design Meme

Squidoo is a new service that was opened for public Beta testing today. It lets you easily create a webpage focused on a topic that you’re interested in. These pages, or ‘lenses’ as they’re called, allow experts on a particular subject to link to content, RSS feeds, and other web 2.0 services.

Page creators, or ‘Lensmasters’, focus on the information they’re adding on their particular topic and aren’t able to modify the page design. This gives the entire Squidoo network a consistent appearance that makes it easier for people to navigate between the increasing number of pages lenses. The interface for adding elements to the page is nicely done and uses many of the new AJAX techniques such as drag and drop content placement that we’re starting to see appear in “web 2.0” applications.

Squiddo is the creation of Seth Godin, the best-selling business author and speaker, and his involvement with this project has many people more excited about it’s prospects than you might expect from what at first glance is another community blog/wiki project. It wasn’t until this evening that I remembered where I’d heard Seth’s name before—he wrote The Bootstrappers Bible, which I read last year and found very insightful and inspiring.

I’m not sure if this will become as big as they’re hoping, but I’ve signed up for an account and will be putting some pages lenses together on topics I’m interested in, like webcomics.