Focus Your Interests
Nathan Black
Video Game Programmer
Austin, Texas
Squidoo: How did you decide what to make your lenses about?
Nathan: They're about things that are particularly relevant and interesting to me lately. You can even see that in the lenses themselves. Take the Austin, Underground lens. You can tell I've been spending more time at Beerland and Elysium.
S: Have you separated your personal and professional interests?
N: Not so much. My lenses just hit different aspects of my life. My life is composed of many, many interests. Everything informs everything else. Without the years of martial arts I took, I would never have studied Zen or the I Ching. Without those understandings, I wouldn't have gotten as much out of the skateboarding I've been doing in the past few years.
S: Do you maintain a web site or blog otherwise?
N: I do, but it's nothing to speak of. It's kind of scattered.
S: That's interesting, given that your lenses are so focused. Does Squidoo help you focus your interests and ideas?
N: Squidoo seems to work best for tightly focused information. I haven't created a skateboarding lens yet because the subject is too broad. I'm imagining a set of lenses -- covering street skating, skate gear, pool and vert skating, longboarding, slalom, trick tips and companies -- combined with a meta-skateboarding lens that features some general information... and then points to the other lenses. Balancing information density and lens length is important.
S: What have you done with your lenses that you can't do elsewhere?
N: Lenses are useful as content aggregators. They're an easy way to put information together. In the current way of the web, the trend seems to be using multiple specialty sites to collect specific information. Squidoo is a good way to tie all of that information together in a neat, easy-to-use parcel.
In fact, I haven't found a better aggregator. A lens itself is rather transparent -- good metaphor, by the way -- making it more of a portal than a place to expound on things. Other sites tend to provide either encyclopedic information, which is useful if you just want an in-depth article, or are too concerned with static information and keeping you at the site to be useful. Squidoo is nice because of its transparency. It allows lensmasters to direct people to the information they used to educate themselves.
S: What advice or ideas would you offer other lensmasters?
N: Stay focused. Stay current. Revisit frequently. Use the right tool for the task. And above all, write about what you know and love.
