EVERYONE'S AN EXPERT by Seth Godin

EVERYONE'S AN EXPERT is the latest free ebook released by Seth Godin. It is about 32 pages document which talks about the search for Meaning. Through this book, Seth explains about the current web surfing trend and what is ahead of us. Then he talks about the ways and means by which we can increase traffic of our site.

The current generation of the search engines, provide clues than the actual meaning. One has to invest her time to find the meaning. The user on a quest to make sense, looks at various links and pages to understand enough before taking an action. So the current generation of the search engines can be called as Clue machines. Before making a decision, the user pokes in Google, Yahoo even some ads. And what the user does can be called as poking online. So the current generation of the web, web 1.0, delivers matches, but it does not deliver the meaning.

So we need to move on to the second version of the web, web 2.0, where the web enables its users to share meaning. There are two things which are to be taken care. First, people like to listen and the next one is people like to talk. Blogs addresses both the needs. As part of the web 2.0 initiative, we need to have a place where an user (stranger) can go to get some insight and meaning and then leave that site and go somewhere else. Seth calls this place as nowblog. The nowblogs are the best place to start and he even calls them 'Lens'.

A Lens filters light and shows only what is needed. Likewise, lens is a web page, which highlights one person's view of the web. Lens is like a signpost, which quickly answers - What do I need to know? and delivers meaning to the context. It does not hold content, instead it is an organized pointer living in a site filled with other, similarly formatted pointer. However it does not pretend to deliver the complete truth, but provides meaning and links necessary for the user to take action. Unlike a blog, a lens updates itself with RSS feeds and webservices, ie., would do fine without a lot of tweaking and maintenance.

Benefits of Lenses

Quote:

1. Lenses are free 2. A royalty payment. Royalties are earned from all the keyword clicks, affiliate income, and referral fees the lenses generate. 3. More traffic to your blog and your web sites. 4. A way to build credibility for yourself and your organization by serving as a trusted guide. 5. Increased search engine rank for you and the pages you point to.

The person who makes lens is called a Lensmaster, the Expert whom Seth mentions through the title of the book -- Everyone's an Expert.

Quote:

The lensmasters are individuals with strong personal agendas, expertise, causes, products and even opinions.

Who needs to build a lens?

Quote:

1. If you have a website and you're not happy with your PageRank, a lens will increase it. That's because a lens provides exactly what search engines are looking for: authoritative insight so people can find what they're looking for. (That's why wikipedia ranks so highly on search engines - they provide a good experience and satisfied searchers are what search engines are seeking.) 2. If you're an entrepreneur, your lens on a popular topic could generate three or five or twenty dollars a day in clickthrough and affiliate income. Which doesn't sould like much, until you start thinking like an eBay PowerSeller and build twenty or even fifty lenses on a variety of topics. Did you know that 750,000 people make a full - or part-time living on eBay now? The same effect will probably happen with lenses. Don't quit your job yet, but if you build the right lenses and promote them, you ought to earn some royalties.

In a nutshell, following are the top two points which Seth wants to sell through this book,

Quote:

The structured nature of Web 2.0, combined with the folksonomy of tags, makes a lens the perfect middleman between the content and expertise you've already got, and the surfers you've never met. Squidoo lets lensmasters build lenses quickly. Then it connects those lenses to other relevant lenses and provides a search engine to make it easy for any web surfer to find the right lens at the right time.