A Great Idea. On Paper.

Seth Godin’s experiment in using humans as content aggregators has been taking a few rough shots lately. Squidoo is a site that offers individuals the opportunity to collect their knowledge on any topic, become recognized experts on the topic, and maybe make a little money along the way if their Lens gets enough traffic (I earned about $.02 myself so far, not ready to quit my day job). Michael Arrington has been the most vocal critic of Squidoo, writing on TechCrunch, “Squidoo may generate some content creation growth, but I don’t see it generating serious page view growth under their current model.”

I was fortunate enough to try Squidoo during its beta phase and, initially, thought it was a pretty good idea. I quickly realized, however, that there were too many people trying to be experts on the same topic and that if I wanted to make real money, I could install WordPress, get a Google AdSense account, and start writing (that is, of course, if I was actually an expert on anything). Why share my money with Seth when it is easy enough to set up my own site? Essentially, Squidoo is nothing more than a simple blog engine that allows you to add static content and integrate external feeds.

A recent post by Seth seems to seal the fate of Squidoo when he writes, “nearly all our visitors are first-time visitors.” I suppose that is a great stat to mention as long as you have a lot of visitors. At the same time, if you do have a lot of visitors and most of them are first-time visitors, it means nobody is coming back a second time. My guess is they probably headed off to some blogs that offered a better dose of what they’re looking for.

At a time when it is incredibly easy to have your own site, I have a feeling Seth might be about five years late on this one. But even the best have to make a mistake from time to time, don’t they?