SquidWho - Easy to Build People Profile Pages

SquidWho is a new portal and web-building feature from the makers of Squidoo. It's designed to be a Who's Who portal -- all about people both famous and not-so-famous (i.e., you and me!).

What makes SquidWho a little different from the main Squidoo site is that when you enter a name into their search engine, it will only come up with the single best page about that person -- so this encourages people to do their very best work in creating a fanpage.

What's also cool, is that if you are searching for someone and there isn't a SquidWho Lens about that person yet, SquidWho automatically starts creating a page that you can claim and build out, if you like. It's all up to you!

Once you've signed up for Squidoo, you can start building SquidWho pages from your dashboard or from the main SquidWho url. Just enter the name of your favorite famous person in the search box and it will start "magic-building" a page for you if one doesn't exist already.

If there already is a page on SquidWho, you'll be taken straight to that page so you can take a look at it. Is it some rubbishly lens that some squatter is occupying or is it just not as good as a lens you would make? Click "I can do better" and a brand new page will be created.

The "magic-building" process will automatically start surfing the web and pulling in information from various places, but it is up to you to make the lens more unique and interesting.

The modules that are built automatically include:

• A "Three Reasons to Love Your Favorite Person" module
• An excerpt and photo from the Wikipedia entry about that person
• An Amazon module with five thumbnails of products featuring that person
• A Youtube Module with 6 videos featuring that person
• A Flickr Module
• The latest Yahoo News RSS feed
• And a guestbook module

While the automatic page-building feature is a huge timesaver, that's usually not enough to create the best page possible about your favorite famous folks. You'll need to do some additional work.

For instance, the Introductory module is left blank -- so add a photo and complete that section by hand.

Then you'll either want to add text to the "3 Favorite Things" module or delete it altogether. I usually delete it since I put enough info into the introduction where the 3 favorite things would be redundant.

The next place I tweak is the Wikipedia entry. Sometimes it pulls up a great photo and sometimes it pulls up some bizarro photo that has nothing to do with your person -- in the latter case I just go in and turn off the photo and leave the Wiki entry as pure text.

After that, I go into the Amazon module and change that so I can select my own products to feature -- sometimes letting Amazon do the work will pull up products that are just fine, but usually it is so random that you'll be better off deciding for yourself what to feature on the lens.

Next up is Youtube -- I usually leave the automatically built module alone unless the videos grabbed are tototally irrelevant, but what I do is add an additional Youtube module and then search Youtube for the single best video I can find and feature that by itself so it can be played without leaving the lens.

Flickr -- if it has pulled relevant photos I leave it alone, if not I either delete it or do a search on Flickr myself.

After that I usually add other modules -- always a Link List so I can link to the best webpages online about my famous person, then usually another Amazon module or two, and maybe an Ebay one. Then I start moving stuff around so large text blocks are broken up by either videos, modules featuring photos or commerce blocks. Since Amazon and Ebay modules both feature photos of the products, they make a nice way to break up lots of text.

Ready to make your own? Join Squidoo Here