Participating in Squidoo- Squid U Conversation

Here is a comment I posted in response to complaints about spam lenses in the forum:

RK, yes, it is a VERY TOUGH act to balance for Squid Staff. They MUST show an incredible rise in numbers and interest with as few staffers as possible. They must also prove that Squidoo has Google juice which keeps many of my lenses on the first, second and third page! It is an amazing achievement.

On the other hand, if all kinds of 'squid-crap' also gets high Google rankings, it will REALLY damage the real prize Squidoo offers and it will get terrible labels from people outside of squidoo.

Staff has to find a way to both grow at light-speed and to keep the squid-crap from flooding and damaging search engine results on Google, or that 'juice' will dry up FAST.

Lensmasters are the content providers that make Squidoo really good. They can earn money for the content but aren't 'paid providers.' In the same way, certain lensmasters are the advertising providers for Squidoo, earning money for doing it but aren't 'paid providers.'

Squidoo knew what was coming, so they went out of their way to get some 'heavy hitters' in the content arena before the oncoming flood. They got National Geographic, Martha Stewart, Rolling Stone Magazine, Jane Goodall.

So, Squidoo has these as a 'foundation'.

Next thing to do is to get the really committed lensmasters to organize the provided content, which is the future of Squidoo, so they started groups.

The groups use committed people like KCStargazer, Relache, Damon and Me to police and judge content for certain purposes so that all the good content won't be washed away in the endlessly repeating floods. Good lensmasters work hard to get their groups and the content in them to rate high in Google.

It is a masterful strategy and it is working so well. As a result, using lensrank as a purely motivational tool for newbies means that the inbound streams of new lenses will continue at about 1 lens per minute, +-, and the work of sorting it out is done by the groupmasters.

If ever accusations are made that Squidoo is little more than a haven for splenses, it is very easy to show off these great groups- who could then say there is no content here?

As the groups build up with time, as they are, they will rise taller over the flood of crap lenses. The duplicates, the get rich quick stuff, the affiliate only stuff, the intro only lenses will eventually sink to the bottom, and all the congo lines of people who brought their competition in with them will all find their low level.

The good content will stand out through groups.