David E. Bowman — Squidoo Lens Returns

I gave a speech ear­lier this week to the Day­ton LinkedIn Group.  In the speech, I spoke about some easy ways that indi­vid­u­als can use the web to build their per­sonal brand.  One tool I ref­er­enced was Squidoo — one of the most use­ful sites (or group­ing of sites) on the web.

Squidoo is a pow­er­ful tool for shar­ing ideas, find­ing infor­ma­tion, and build­ing your per­sonal brand. It is the brain­child of Seth Godin, one of the fore­most thinkers in the areas of tech­nol­ogy, busi­ness, and mar­ket­ing.  The idea is that every­one is an expert at some­thing, and thus should be able to use the web to help oth­ers by shar­ing that exper­tise.  Squidoo enables users to eas­ily cre­ate a one page web site, called a lens, full of rich con­tent, links, video, notes, polls, rss feeds, and other inter­est­ing items.  The beauty of Squidoo is that you don’t have to know any­thing about writ­ing code to use it, and Google loves it.  It is easy to use, and pro­vides in-depth infor­ma­tion on hun­dreds of thou­sands of top­ics, and con­tin­ues to evolve into a pow­er­ful research tool.

Well, many moons ago I built a Squidoo lens about me.  After all, I fugured that if every­one is sup­posed to be an expert at some­thing, I should be the fore­most expert on the sub­ject of me.  It was up on the web for a while, but then I became dis­sat­is­fied with it.  As a result I took the site down for a makeover. Then, as hap­pens, I got side tracked with other things, and the lens sat dormant.

Well, after giv­ing my speech, there was a huge inter­est amongst those who attended in Squidoo.  Most had never heard of it, and many curi­ous peo­ple have since emailed me for more infor­ma­tion.  All of this reminded me that I still need to bring back the lens about me — and so I did.   View it here or by vis­it­ing http://www.squidoo.com/davidebowman.  The lens was very easy to put together, and offers the world a dif­fer­ent look at me and some of my work.

They recently rebranded the “peo­ple” sec­tion of Squidoo — giv­ing it the clever moniker of Squid­Who.  Check it out, and let me know what you think.  Then, start build­ing your own lenses.  Share your exper­tise with the world.

Some other lenses I have built include:

Day­ton Mar­ket­ing Community

Day­ton Weblogs — which I need to update

The Epilepsy Foun­da­tion of West­ern Ohio — a work in progress

David E. Bowman