You Are What You Know
Steve Garfield
Video producer, editor and videoblogger
Boston, Massachusetts
Squidoo: How did you decide what to make your lens about?
Steve: I wanted to make a lens about me because Wikipedia deleted my entry. They say I'm not famous enough. It's insulting.
Right now my "home page" is coded in HTML. It's a pain to go in and edit. That page leads you to a number of blogs, which have details on the many different things I'm involved in. To learn about me, people need to spend hours looking through my many blogs. I've even got a simple about page on my TypePad blogs. I was all over the place.
I also wanted to make a lens about videoblogs. I'm the #1 search result for "video blog" in Google, so people are always emailing me with questions. They want to know what are my favorite vlogs, how to start a vlog, and where should they go for more information. So I usually send off an email detailing the specific answers to their questions. A lot of the time, it's the same information. So I figured that a lens on videoblogging would help me compile an easy to access list of great information that I think people who are looking to get started in videoblogging should know.
Sq: What have you done with your lens that you can’t do elsewhere?
St: A few things that I've done, I've wanted to do for a long time, but hadn't come across a good way to do it. One cool thing is including an RSS feed from a couple of my blogs. That way, visitors can see in one place, my recent blog posts from both sites.
The other thing that I've started doing is grabbing info from a deli.cio.us feed I just set up for press coverage. As I get written up in different places, I used to make a blog entry about it. Now, I can easily post a link to the news article to deli.cio.us, and then have the lens automatically display the most recent articles from the deli.cio.us RSS feed. That is one sweet solution.
The third thing I like is having a place to post comments that people have made about my video blog. Comments tend to get buried in a blog comments system but with Squidoo, I've got them right on my lens.
Sq: What’s the neatest thing you’ve come across in other lenses you’ve seen?
St: I found a fellow video blogger, Deirdre Straughan, who has a lens on videoblogging resources. So I linked to her from my videoblogs lens! Very cool. I'm spreading the link love.
Sq: What advice or ideas would you offer other lensmasters?
St: Make a lens about yourself! Get started now. Who better to write about yourself than you? Over on Wikipedia they have a stupid rule that you can't write about yourself. They call it a vanity post. What do they want over there, ill-informed entries written by strangers, which are then edited by other strangers?
Take control of your own history. If not for me, do it for future generations!
