Quick! What are you an expert at?

Seth Godin is beta testing a new thing called squidoo.

I don't know who Seth is.

I just looked it up. The "thing" is a platform.

Basically, if you are an expert at something you can use his platform (from what I gather a platform is what this blog uses. I use blogspot.com as my platform for posting my thoughts.) to create what he calls a lens. A lens is a way of magnifying the web pages that you have found on the web that are the most informative or helpful in understanding or addressing your area of expertise.

Say you know a lot about . . . oh say, intensive grazing of cattle, or abnormal psychology, or wayward Baptists, or music, or legos, or leading a sunday school class, or a youth group, or being a first year teacher, or $200 steaks, or jewelry, or taxidermy or anything! You can go to Squidoo.com (this isn't up and running just yet) and set up your lens to "magnify" the best sights on the web for your particular area of expertise.

Now say you just got back from Switzerland and wanted to learn about fondu. Which fondu dishes work, which ones don't, what fuel works, what fuel is likely to burn your house down if you try to use it as fondu fuel when it really isn't, what to do if you start a fire.

If you google fondu, you will have to search several sites all of which will probably want to sell you their fondu dish.
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Okay, I just tried fondu on Google. The first thing that came up was the correct spelling of fondue. Then most of the sights were on recipes. Anyway, you get the point, you would have to poke around on multiple websites, some would be helpful, but most would not.

But Squidoo will change the modern world as we know it!

Yell! I AM AN EXPERT!

And really if I am an expert that means the world is changing significantly. (We have a class that is offered at our church called Discover Your Design. The idea is that God has created you to be unique with a unique purpose and unique likes and dislikes, Seth seems to be saying the same thing.) Seth is democratizing expertise.

Now when I need to find out about fondue, I will simply go to squidoo.com, type in fondue and I will be taken to a lens about fondue. What if there are lots of lenses on a particular subject? Seth can tell how long people are poking around particular lenses. Those that are the best will have the longest "poking-around-the-website" times among its users.

Well, I gotta run. I want to be an expert on something before squidoo gets fully underway.