Squidoo, from the brain (partially) of Seth Godin.

An excerpt from "Flipping the Funnel", the new ebook from Godin, available as a free download at this website.

Squidoo is an all-purpose platform for user-generated content. It’s designed to make it easy for each member of your fan club to build a page that highlights the best of what you have to offer.

A Squidoo page contains links—links to products for sale, to reviews, to pictures, to videos, to RSS feeds, and to blogs. A Squidoo page, which is called a lens, is one person’s take on one topic.

A lens on London, for example, could include links to five restaurants, with a quick paragraph on each one. The lens could include a description of a favorite hotel, with a link to the hotel’s page about a specific suite. The lens
might feature three or four guidebooks for sale on Amazon, some tourist memorabilia on auction at eBay, and pointers to Flickr postings of great sites to visit.

The only thing the pages have in common is that they are built by real people, for real people. Squidoo pages form a social database—a human index of the best stuff on a given topic.

The magic of Squidoo comes from the proximity effect. Every lens is next to every other lens, so the serendipityof exploration kicks in. Squidoo attracts traffic from across the Web—people find a lens they are interested in, and it leads them to another lens, or to a product or a service they didn’t know about. The person coming to a lens is exploring—looking for new ideas and solutions—which is exactly where you want to be.

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Yes, this is designed as a marketing tool, but it has some damn interesting stuff in here so far. It wouldn't be much work to create your very own lens for a band you like, link to their website, link to Obner, link to merch, link to the album and music sniffers like many on this board could start expanding our reach among other sniffers. It could also help bring new blood into the board, which isn't a bad thing either.

I was reading different posts on design, freelancing, small businesses and the like last night. While not everything was groundbreaking, it was generally easily digestible and on topic. I doubt there are many here who are on Squidoo, but I just thought I'd axe.