Bryan Bartow » web2.0

Much Ado About Squidoo

Bryan — Wed, 10 May 2006 03:48:00 +0000

I recently covered Squidoo and mentioned that I had set up a "Lens" to see what kind of response I would get out of it. Within the last couple of days, Michael from TechCrunch wrote an article predicting its demise. Today, Pete from Mashable picked up the discussion. The census seems to be that Squidoo will die if they remain a "walled garden", or closed service. Their other hinderance is that they don't allow for community interactions around the "Lens". Of course, I already wrote this in my previous post.

Texas Longhorns – Zimbio

Bryan — Sun, 07 May 2006 17:17:00 +0000

I created a Zimbio portal for my beloved University of Texas Longhorns. It will be interesting to see if I can get any user participation. I'm curious to see just how useful other people will find this type of resource.

A New Kind of Portal II

Bryan — Sun, 07 May 2006 07:00:00 +0000

No sooner than I post on Zimbio do I find yet another interesting take on "portals". This time it's called Squidoo and I think I like it too, albeit for different reasons. Squidoo does things a bit differently than does Zimbio. First, Squidoo portals, or "lenses", are maintained by a single person and not by the community at large. Second, Squidoo earns revenue from Google AdWords and shares that revenue with the Lens Masters (those "experts" who have made Lenses on various topics). Both models are unique and interesting in their own ways. I'm very curious to see if these can pass the "wife test". Will they become simple and useful enough to catch on past the early adopters? Squidoo's problems are that it's a "walled garden" (as far as I can tell) and that it doesn't open communication lines between users. These two factors might seriously hinder its potential.

A New Kind of Portal

Bryan — Sun, 07 May 2006 00:06:00 +0000

I recently was turned on to a really interesting "Web 2.0" site named Zimbio. Zimbio has taken a very unique spin on web portals. Basically, they've given users the ability to create their own "portals" on a wide range of topics. The cool thing is that any user can contribute to the portal in a number of different ways. There is a group blog, forums, links, blog rolls, picture galleries and more. Each portal has an AIM-driven chat room as well as IM presence indicators for each contributing member of the portal. I believe this is the future of "portals": online communities of people aggregating relevant content around a certain topic. This blurb certainly hasn't done the site justice. There is much more here than what I have covered. The community seems to be relatively young (I believe they just left private beta) so go visit and find a topic to contribute to and discover the future of information portals on the web.