Quite a few of Ron’s buzz challenges are related to Web marketing and promotion, including his challenge to create a Squidoo Lens.

What is Squidoo?

It’s the creation of Seth Godin – a site that allows anyone to create a web page of content. It uses a widget-style interface to let you add text, RSS feeds, Amazon links and a ton of other things.

In Seth Godin’s book, Small Is The New Big, he talks about Squidoo:

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.

Godin envisions people creating lenses about you, in turn creating a huge, content-rich and viral network of people buzzing about your business. But I suspect most of the time people are creating lenses about themselves, much more like MySpace pages.

So Squidoo is another way of advertising and promoting your business. Fair enough.

You can make money off Squidoo – Google ads are placed on your lens, and there are a couple other ways of doing it as well. Or you can donate the money to charity.

I went ahead and created a Squidoo lens for one of Grasshopper New Media’s podcast shows, The Livin’ La Vida Low Carb Show.

Check out the low-carb lifestyle lens.

I’ve included feeds from the podcast and Jimmy Moore’s blog on low-carb living. Sponsors of the podcast show are listed along with links to other Grasshopper New Media content.

Sites like Squidoo are often based heavily on community. Squidoo has groups that you can join (and form) on related subject matters. I’ve just started that process and we’ll see what the results bring.

Here are my thoughts after my brief experimentation with Squidoo:

• Building lenses is very slick. They’ve got the technology and interface down pat, and it’s easy to do.
• I haven’t been blown away by the content on Squidoo. I looked at a number of the top Squidoo lenses but because they all look so similar the content gets lost. Some of the lenses look like “splogs” (spam blogs designed to make money with AdSense.)
• I’ve never seen a Squidoo lens appear highly ranked in a Google search. Come to think of it, I’ve never seen a Squidoo lens appear in a Google search. Does that mean Squidoo pages aren’t indexed by Google?
• If someone already has a blog, does a Squidoo lens really add a lot of value?

We’ll have to wait and see what happens. I’ll be tracking traffic from our low carb lifestyle Squidoo lens to the Livin’ La Vida Low Carb Show podcast. It didn’t take long to put the Squidoo lens together, so even if it brings over 1 new listener, it’ll have been worthwhile…