Introduction to the Lens Concept
Internet experts think a new trend could sweep the Internet soon: Lenses.
What is a lens? The following is summarized from Seth Godin's ebook, Everyone's An Expert (About Something), the writer and web wiz who is promoting the idea of lenses at his site, Squidoo. (Readers will forgive the plastic prose. I am still trying to discern the exact idea of a lens, so many of the sentences below are "lifted" directly from Godin with little modification.)
A lens is a single page that highlights one person's view of a portion of the Web. A lens quickly answers the question: “What do I need to know about X.”
A lens will often concentrate on specific topic: expresso coffee, for instance, or the War of 1812, or Thomas Aquinas. The lens would provide an overview and a link to the best websites that address different facets of that topic. In that way, the lens reader would have an orderly way to research.
But a lens can also be about a blog (Godin refers to it as a "Nowblog"). A lens amplifies a blog and gives a surfer a window into the blog.
I can't say that I've "bought into" the idea, but it makes sense to me. I have gone ahead and prepared a TDE lens, though I haven't used the two-column format that Godin occasionally refers to. It is posted to the left.
