Make money with Squidoo

CNNMONEY.COM: An online community of 'lenses' allows people to earn a buck while sharing their expertise.

Internet marketing pioneer Seth Godin wants his new start-up firm Squidoo.com to make money. But unlike most business executives, he wants to give his money away -- to charity and to the people who power his site.

Squidoo is an online platform of hand-built directories that anyone can create for free using a tool on the Squidoo site. The directories, also called lenses, resemble blogs, except each lens is devoted to a single topic.

Squidoo acts as an intermediary to search engines, giving people a "big picture" view on any given topic.

"Google is too good," Godin said, adding that a search engine might turn up millions of pages for a given search, potentially overwhelming people with information.

The Squidoo site allows so-called lensmasters to share their expertise on a given topic so others don't have to wade through piles of information.

The top 100 lenses visited on Squidoo include topics ranging from the power of raw food to ways for transforming your office cubicle into a gym. Martha Stewart even hosts a lens on making cookies.

Squid have large eyes, and each lens on Squidoo provides a view on the world, Godin said, explaining the origin of the company's name. It ends in "oo" since tech companies with two "o"s in their name -- Google, Yahoo!, Godin's own Yoyodyne -- have all been a success.

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=> Read Seth Godin's Blog here.