I read about Squidoo, went over, and landgrabbed the Smalltalk Lens.

Squidoo seems to be another one of the current crop of user-managed lists. What started with the Open Directory Project, seems to become more and more a mainstream activity–technorati, del.icio.us, etcetera are just further examples. Squidoo just seems to suck a bit more, especially their “lensmaster” user interface is horrible (read up about Ajax, guys, you could really benefit from it).

There must be a reason that these engines seem to be on the uprise. Google is fluctuating in their quality, but so far it seems that they keep winning the various battles with linkspammers and large commercial networks–for example, a year ago, if you typed in a consumer product, you’d have 10 pages of shop catalogs before getting to that good review, but that seems to have become better.

Are people distrusting large companies like Google? Or is is that craving for authority–any authority–that people have? Is something more valuable because some guy (or lots of identifiable guys) said it?

I dunnow. But until Squidoo fixes its linkmaster UI, don’t expect too much of the Smalltalk lens

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 15th, 2005 at 6:58 pm and is filed under Stuff on the Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Stumble it!  Post to del.icio.us