e.politics: online advocacy tools & tactics

Experimenting with a Squidoo Lens

January 4th, 2007

Hey guys, the folks over at Squidoo asked me to take a look at using their site, so I just finished creating a “lens” page for online political advocacy. What is Squidoo? A site that simultaneously tries to sort through the mass of information on the web by allowing “experts” to set up overview pages (lenses) on particular topics (kind of like a wiki) while also raising money for charities (lens owners can dedicate the revenue from Google ads on their pages to a select list of nonprofits).

At the moment, I’ve set up the online politics lens to see what kind of traffic it will draw and to experiment with features. Later, we’ll set up an environmentally-themed lens on behalf of my day job (National Environmental Trust) and see how effective IT is. I’ll keep you guys posted about how things go, and in the meantime you might consider setting up your own lenses to see what you can find. Establishing a lens may be a good way to position you or your campaign as a go-to source on your chosen topic.

Hmmm, I wonder if there’s a need for lenses on sloth and beer? Extensive near-lethal experimentation would be required…but I’d try to bear up nobly under the strain.

– cpd

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2 Comments Add your own

1. Beth | January 5th, 2007 at 4:26 pm

This seemed like a great way to drive a little extra traffic to my campaign’s website so I started making a Squidoo lens about the issue I work on and then realized that the top google ads were for the front group for the industry we’re targeting. So I think it will be difficult to use the site for advocacy until Squidoo gives users some control over the ads displayed on their “lenses”.
2. Andrew Hemingway | June 22nd, 2009 at 11:01 am

How has squidoo held up? What have your findings been over these 2 years?

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