Why Squidoo?
In the comment section of a recent blog post, Carrie asks:
What's behind your choice of Squidoo as a platform for your new site? Were there other ones you considered and rejected? Ones like Joomla or Drupal.
For those of you not following closely, Carrie is talking about not just one site but three soon to be followed by others including:
• The Coal Country Chronicle, soon to be an information hub for news and views from the Pennsylvania Anthracite region
• Tamaqua Gateway Gazette, a similar Internet hub about a small town I used to live and where I still own a home (Are you in the market?)
• Ocean City Fever, about one of my favorite vacation destinations ocean city, Maryland
The idea of launching these three sites and others to come was simple. I am trying to bootstrap a venture called Postranger.com, a company that could best described as part, blog platform, part social network and part message board.
Without programming experience or the financing to build the network I envision (I've not yet found an existing platform that does all the things I'm looking for in a social blog network application) I'm focusing on generating revenue through created content.
Though I think after checking out both Joomla and Drupla recently that both have intriguing possibilities, I picked Squidoo for a couple of simple reasons:
• Ease of operation. Squidoo really is an easy way to build a website and though I find some features like photo loading a bit tiresome compared with blog platforms, overall it's simple and fast use
• Revenue potential. Squidoo has a whole menu of revenue generating tools from Google Adsense to Ebay and Netflix ads that are easy to set up. Setting up additional revenue generation on most blog platforms is often another tedious step.
• Limited rules. Squidoo doesn't have a lot of silly rules to constrain a content creator from making a simple and small business out of providing content. In fact, Seth Godin, the entrepreneur behind Squidoo even uses the site to promote his stuff.
• Unlimited potential. With the ability to rearrange and create what seems to be an almost limitless number of new modules, Squidoo could easily be the next step in the evolution of the blog itself. Imagine a Squidoo lens updated regularly with the newest stuff on top.
Hope this answers your question to some degree at least, Carrie. Thanks for the comment.
May 13th, 2008 at 8:57 am
Hello,
It’s interesting to see your reasoning behind the choice of Squidoo. It does sound quite flexible and easier for your purposes than working on Joomla or Drupal. I believe I had misinterpreted the Postranger.com concept. At first I thought it was a central website with subsites devoted to small towns. Now I understand it is a platform allowing small town’s to develop an online town community/website? Do you have a one liner tag phrase for it? I have been admiring AdBrites tag line “The Internet’s Ad Marketplace” for its simplicity and clarity.
May 13th, 2008 at 7:30 pm
In fact, PostRanger.com is even broader and simpler in concept than that. The idea is to allow anyone to be able to publish anything in blog format but with the added community characteristics of leaving some topics open for guest posts from multiple authors. Let’s say you want to want to start a blog on anything from your hometown to your love of the 60′s Star Trek TV series. You can create the blog and then alloow anoyone anywhere to sign in for a free account and create their own blog posts as guest bloggers. Most blogs already allow guest blogging but require you to invite the guest blogger. PostRanger would allow you to sign up to guest post as simply as you join MySpace. You could also keep your blogs for yourself on a variety of topics…on any subject. The site would allow you to have your say or report on important issues, promote your own music, podcasts or other creative media or build a business. It would be like Blogger, MySpace and Yahoo! Groups rolled up into one.