Squidoo and Tech Crunch: Wisdom from the mud pit of arrogance

Disclaimer: I’m a fan of Seth Godin and I’m honored that he has, on more then one occasion, called me a friend. So, like Michael Arrington did when his friend Dave Winer was taking body shots, I’m rising up to defend Seth and his current project Squidoo.  And, as a further clear disclaimer, I’m talking to Seth about doing something interesting with Squidoo.

Okay, with that out of the way. I was going to let this one pass with an eye roll but, I can’t.

On May 9th, Michael Arrington post an entry about Squidoo, entitled Squidoo: Seth Godin’s Purple Albatross? in which he takes a shot at Seth’s business and makes the prediction that Seth takes a hit if the business fails.

“ If Squidoo doesn’t work out as planned, and I don’t think it will, Seth loses more than his time and whatever capital he’s put into Squidoo. He also loses credibility as an expert in product marketing. To borrow the metaphor, Squidoo could become an albatross around Seth’s neck.”

He then makes a point to talk about how little money is being made by the folks making content (Lens masters).

“The best lenses are generating $30 or so a month for the lens master.”

Michael, of course, glosses over the thousands of dollars being given to charity preferring to claim the Squidoo is going sideways and making snarky albatross comments along the way. And yes, he does know about the charity dollars raised, he uses a forwarded email from Squidoo to make his 30 dollar comment while avoiding the charity message in that same email.

I’ve waited about a week to talk about this for a couple of reasons.

First, I contacted a number of the people putting up content on Squidoo and took the few minutes to ask the really simple question of: Why.  Why are you doing this vs. all the other ways to either make money, get noticed, etc.  The overwhelming answer was equally as simple as the question. It was simple, interesting and a few hours of my time tossed a few bucks into some charity buckets.

Second, when Squidoo first started I went straight to the source, Seth, and asked yet another simple question: What’s up with this gig and what’s the plan?  I got an answer in a cab ride to Oxford.  All of this blogging, experts, sharing, etc, is still in its infancy and I’ve got lots of questions on where it is going. This is an interesting why to find out. Plus there are some interesting business opportunities, stay tuned, I need to see where it will go.

Fast forward to today. The release service hasn’t been out for years, hasn’t put a do or die stake in the ground and for all we know is providing Seth (and crew) a wealth of data from outside the Tech Crunch, Silicon Valley, echo chamber.  For all we know, Squidoo is performing exactly what was/is expected. Given that the funding is coming from Hip Pocket National Bank, the Seth Godin branch, if it turns into a non-profit hobby/data collection experiment, that might be success for all we know.

It seems incredibly presumptuous on the part of anyone to say it is dead, claim it won’t work, or declare any verdict unless the business plan is fully explained, metrics laid out, and the company says we went for A and, oops, sorry, thems the breaks.  In short, so long as a few charities get some money, people find the site useful, and no animals were harmed in the testing, I’d suggest the these types of pontification and pronouncements from Tech Crunch stay focused on the over hyped Web 2.0 stuff pouring out of California on a daily basis. Certainly that target rich environment deserves the time of Michael Arrington more then a nice little corner of the web generating revenue for charity.

But from the mud pit of arrogance that is the anonymous comment section of Tech Crunch, comes this rather sane and smart observation from one Kevin Briody who writes:

“Prediction - Seth will write up a fantastic book on lessons learned from Squidoo, which will be taught in grad courses during the ramp up to whatever “Web 3.0&Prime ends up being.  I honestly don’t see his credibility taking much of a hit. Interesting idea which he gave a fair shot. That’s the whole spirit of startups.”

Well said, Kevin. Bonus points for actually signing your comments, nice blog, by the way, cute kids.

Memo to Michael Arrington fans: I’ve never met the man personally and have been told by people I trust, Shel Israel in particular, that he is a nice enough person.  It’s not personal and I’m not in any way calling Michael arrogant or anything of the sort, put the rocks away.

Comments

[stewart]

Test and learn is the best marketing one can do

[Nick Swan]

Lets wait and see what happens to Edgeio, and if that fails will Mike Arrington and TechCrunch take a credibility hit?

[Alex Krupp]

Great post. I also read the original, and I think Arrington doesn't know what he's talking about. One of the most persistent themes throughout Seth's books is Fail Early and Often. Even if Squidoo does fail, which is by no means guaranteed, it would almost reinforce Seth's message even more. If Squidoo fails, at least it will fail cheaply and fail upwards.

The biggest problem with Squidoo right now is that they target the majority, whereas in reality it is the top 1% of the people that contribute 90% of the content. Just look at Wikipedia, the top 1% of contributers contribute 85% of the edits or something like that. So the optimal strategy is to make it as easy as possible for the top contributors to contribute, rather than making it easy for everyone to contribute. My How To Start A Startup lens was at one point ranked #5, but I haven't really been building more lenses because it just takes so long with the GUI. While they made this trade off in anticipation of normal people creating lenses about themselves, local politicians, their church, etc. this really hasn't happened yet. It may or may not happen in the future, but I still think a better strategy would have been to use wiki syntax first to get a core group of contributors, and then build a GUI later.

Squidoo has this problem both with its lenses, and with its modules, where they don't let people design their own modules because they want consistent branding, i.e. they want one Amazon module, not five. After several months they still have only a dozen or so modules, and some of them, like the Super Store, aren't really that usable. (Do a search for teapots and you get thousands of redundant or off topic results with no way to sort through them)

Squidoo's other main problem is that it is too commercial. It is hard to believe other people's recommendations when they are making a commission. This is all the worse because many times you can't make money by recommending the best products, so if you want to make money you need to recommend inferior stuff. For example, the best place to buy teapots (and tea) online is specialteas.com, but the closest I can get is Amazon because there is no specialteas module, and there never will be since users can't make their own modules. This instantly calls into doubt any recommendation I make. For this reason Slashdotters and Wikipedians and the like won't go anywhere near the site.

Anyway, if I had to wager a guess I'd say that Squidoo will eventually succeed with a few changes, but it will take longer than it should have due to try skipping the early adopters.

[Alex Krupp]

And less than an hour after I post this, I find someone else who says exactly the same thing, but in reference to a Squidoo competitor which may have gotten it right.

http://customerevangelists.typepad.com/blog/2006/05/charting_wiki_p.html

insanity

[Kevin Briody]

Thanks for nice words Rick (about my comment AND my blog and kid!).