Squidoo Rankings and Review - Feb 2006

Since Squidoo’s launch, I’ve been experimenting with different type of lenses. Now that some are near their 90 day point, I thought I’d provide a non-scientific review.

I’m happy to say that as of today three of my eleven public lenses are rated in the top 100. Surprisingly, SuperBowl XL Ads is still ranked 21st. My other seasonal lenses like Top 10 2006 and Christmas Beers and Ales have fallen to 6,805 and 9,020. Both of these were in the top 100 during their season. So the conclusion is that seasonal lenses can do very well. Reviewing these a year from now will be interesting. Another thing I learned is that renewable seasonal lenses need a generic lens as well: See SuperBowl Ads which will become a listing for future annual lenses.

Sudoku has had the best ride on Squidoo and it is ranked 21st. With Squidoo’s launch, it got picked up in a few blogs and was both a “poster child” and a dart board for the concept of lenses. So unit recently, it was always in the top 10 of lenses. A real benefit is that the lens continues to provide a regular traffic to my AllSudoku.com sudoku games site. It is not clear what the drop in ranks means though the change in how rankings are calculated makes a deference. It may also be that the Sudoku fad is fading.

My Sony Ericsson w600i lens has steadily moved up in ranking to where it is now 63rd. I think that the Squidoo format was a good fit for this topic. And this is becoming a popular cell phone.

My other lenses are basically going unnoticed. Vienna, Virginia, Dave Winer, Love Monkey and McLuhan are in the 2,500 to 5,000 range. It didn’t help that the Love Monkey TV show was cancelled after its third epsisode. And Dave Winer has not linked to the lens I created about his work. But more importantly for Squidoo’s business model is my lenses have less than 10 inbound links.

Overall, I still like Squidoo lenses. I’ve really enjoyed some that others have created and I’ll write those up later. Also, I think that tagging is working which surprises me. I believeSquidoo needs to involve lens readers more. Perhaps digging lenses is need. Or comments. Something to make it easy for readers to explore another lens.

Patently Absurd - Not Enough Sand!

I couldn’t agree more with Rob Pegoraro in the Post about patent law. The spreadsheet was never patented, luckily. I believe it would have set back the entire computer revolution that gave us great productivity gains. Ajaxian reported on a Patents Gone Wild about a patent for online rich media. While I believe we need to protect inventors, this has tipped to the absurd. People are taking speculative investments in lawyers pursuing patent blackmail instead of traditional venture capital. Bring on the sand!

Join the Movement. Bring back Phil Dohahue.

Bill O’Reilly has started a petition to bring back Phil Donahue. The truth is that Bill wants to replace his competition on MSNBC that is on during the same time slot. Bill’s ratings are slipping and he’s looking for the good old day. Nice stunt Bill.

Off For a Walk

I’ve not been blogging lately because I’m working on the next best thing since “sliced bread” or maybe the ATM. But I need more exercise, so I’m going out on a long walk and then I’ll come back to code some more. Maybe on my walk I’ll think up a name for this new Web 2.0 product/service.

New Web Browsers Announced, sorta.

Yahoo released a UI library for web browsers and this changes everything. Old school was waiting for a new web browser to be released with new features. Now with these libraries from Yahoo and others, we have new web browsers by just including some JavaScript libraries. This part of what makes AJAX so exciting.

They need a demo pages that shows examples of everything. Maybe they’ll do that on the Yahoo! User Interface blog.

Ted Leonis, blogger

Ted Leonsis has a pretty good first blog entry. Let’s see what the next 100 look like.

Spacesuit as satellite

Eerie picture of a spacesuit drifting away from the space station.

Geography Does Fit the Leadership

When you think of a state governor, you this of a high power political executive. When you think of a head politician in a county you don’t always thing the term executive applies. I think we have this hierarchy of country, state, county mindset that effects our view of county politicians. I don’t know how many counties are larger in population than the smallest state, but I would guess that it is more than a 100. So we have to think differently about these leaders.

Years ago I moved into Fairfax County when Jack Herrity was the chairman of the Board of Supervisors. He was a leader. He got things done like they do in Chicago. This county became the economic engine of the state and a great place to live in part because of his leadership.

So locally people will take note of his death, but because our of mindset about state governors, it won’t get as much notice. It should. He did alot for alot of people. He’s appreciated.