It's Early, but Maybe It's Working

It has only been about six hours since Squidoo updated its lens rankings. As soon as I saw that my Novelty Songs lens had gotten the green check and had moved up in the rankings to around 118,000 (out of more than 700,000), which is typical for a new lens, I got to work.

First I lensrolled Novelty Songs to the lenses listed in the lens itself. Then I went through each of the six lenses and lensrolled them to the Novelty Songs lens and to each other, and I lensrolled the Yankovic lens by the Polish guy to Novelty Songs and the Dr. Demento showcases.

I added Novelty Songs to Lensroll.com, which only allows two lens submissions per day (I just added Ground Fog Day before starting this post). Then I went through all seven lenses with Sharaholic, a Firefox addon that connects to places like Del.icio.us, Digg, Facebook and StumbleUpon, adding each one. The other six are video showcases are:

• Dr. Demento Hit Parade
• Dr. Demento Hit Parade 2
• Spike Jones
• Allan Sherman
• Tom Lehrer
• Victor Borge

I really think I'm only scratching the surface with those listing sites. There seem to be quite a lot of them. But even at that, I've seen some results. In just this short time, the sites, some of which hadn't had any visitors since they were created nearly a month ago, have had a few visitors - it looks like three people have looked at all of them. It's not much, but it's a start.

On a more positive note, for yesterday and today I've had eight lenses in the top 10,000. That's the most ever. Those are:

• Kit Cat Clock
• Ground Fog Day
• Sarah Vowell
• Mount St. Helens
• Best Sellers
• MobyD
• Bill Bryson
• Spoonerisms

My lowest ranked lens is in the 143,000 range, which tells me it isn't hard to keep a lens in the top quarter of all lenses. Of course, so many lenses on Squidoo were thrown together hastily and never updated. Some, unfortunately are very spammy and giving Squidoo a bad reputation in some quarters, or so I've heard. But Squidoo is also home to very useful and entertaining lenses by some very interesting people. That's what I'm aiming for, and I think I'm doing fairly well at it.