Wah Glossary

Squidoo.com, LLC.

Type	Search Engine
Founded	2005
Headquarters	Irvington, NY, USA
Key people	Seth Godin, Original Squid. Megan Casey, Editor in Chief Gil Hildebrand, Jr., Chief Engineer Corey Brown, COO Kimberly Dawn Wells, Community Organizer
Industry	Internet
Revenue	Unknown
Employees	4
Slogan	Where people like you share their knowledge
Website	www.squidoo.com

Squidoo is a website launched in October 2005 by Squidoo.com, LLC based in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. It is a platform designed to make it easy for anyone, for free, to set up a single page on a topic he or she knows or cares a lot about. Squidoo came out of beta testing in March 2006.

Squidoo is a network of user-generated lenses –single pages that highlights one person’s point of view, recommendations, or expertise. Lenses can be about anything, such as ideas, people or places, hobbies and sports, pets or products, philosophy, and politics. Lenses aren’t primarily intended to hold content; more emphasis is placed on recommending and then pointing to content on the web. Annotation and organization and personalization delivers context and meaning.

Users who create lenses are called lensmasters. A lensmaster uses the tools available online to provide links, feeds, abstracts, and lists to users who are trying to make sense of a topic. For example, a single lens could point to Flickr photos, Google maps, blogs, eBay auctions, YouTube videos, and other links. Lensmasters are encouraged to promote personal agendas, expertise, causes, products, and opinions.

Squidoo splits its revenue with its “co-op” of lensmasters. 5% goes straight to charity, first. Then 50% goes to the lensmasters. 45% goes to Squidoo. The site is estimating that nearly half of all the lensmasters on the site are donating their royalties to any of 65 featured charities, ranging from NPR and The American Heart Association to smaller organizations like Chimp Haven and Planet Gumbo.

Squidoo was founded by author, speaker, and notable blogger Seth Godin. On Godin’s founding team was his book editor Megan Casey, Fast Company employee Heath Row, Corey Brown, and Gil Hildebrand, Jr.

According to Alexa, Squidoo’s traffic has grown more than 40% monthly beginning in the spring of 2007. It is now in the top 500 of all websites tracked worldwide.