Do you Squidoo? If you’re mar­ket­ing some­thing, there’s a new tool that might be useful.

I’ve been play­ing with Squidoo — I’d read about it when Seth Godin first announced it, but didn’t check it out fully until I read about Dar­ren Rowes’ exper­i­men­ta­tions with it.

So what is it? It’s like About.com with a more demo­c­ra­tic edi­to­r­ial process, where any­one can be an edi­tor of their own “lense” — a page on a par­tic­u­lar topic. The idea is that the most pop­u­lar lenses rise to the top of the pile. It’s very “Web 2.0″ — I can’t describe it with­out get­ting all buzz­wordy, sorry! The Squidoo slo­gan “everyone’s an expert on some­thing” pretty much describes what it’s all about.

So, off I went and started cre­at­ing. The sign up process was straight­for­ward, with some nice Ajax touches — when select­ing a lens name, for exam­ple, it checks what you’ve entered when the field loses focus and lets you know if your choice has already been taken. The process of learn­ing how to edit your lense — poten­tially quite a large curve — was sim­ple, for me any­way. Some­one not so famil­iar with web appli­ca­tions might have some more trou­ble. After I had fin­ished, I dis­cov­ered a link in the footer to “SquidU” — a large online tuto­r­ial area. Sur­pris­ing that it’s not more obvi­ous dur­ing the cre­ation process. Or maybe I’m blind.

Next I added some “mod­ules” — RSS feeds, links lists, tech­no­rati tag feeds (which don’t seem to be work­ing), and Ama­zon affli­ate links. The Ama­zon angle is pre­sum­ably how Squidoo will even­tu­ally be mon­e­tized, along with the Google AdSense ads. When the ser­vice gets out of beta, there will appar­ently be a rev­enue shar­ing arrange­ment with the lense authors. Inter­est­ing concept.

So ta-da! Here’s the final prod­uct: Best Prac­tises Web Devel­op­ment. There’s more stuff I would like to have done — mostly more links, and some feeds — but I’m stuck on dialup at the moment and edit­ing is just too painfully slow. I don’t know if it will be some­thing worth main­tain­ing — but it cer­tainly was an inter­est­ing process.