Squid wha? — The Internet is chock-full of people who think they know it all — or, as squidoo.com puts it, "everyone's an expert on something." Do you know everything there is to know about the digestive habits of liver flukes? Now, instead of being just a dorky social outcast, you can be a dorky social outcast with your very own "lens." Squidoo, which is in beta (Web-speak for trial) form, allows users to create individual pages called "lenses" which pinpoint a particular topic, obscure or otherwise. The pages include media ranging from basic info to photos, video clips and lots of links to other informative Web sites on said topic. It's almost like a mini-encyclopedia (in fact, one publication describes it as "Friendster meets Wikipedia").
You can browse lenses by broad topic — for instance, "entertainment" or "food" — or search for a particular person or subject (always wanted to know more about the openly gay tattooed Japanese-American supermodel-mechanic Jenny Shimizu? Now you can!)
Anyone can create their own lens — the caveat being that there's no assurance the information you're getting is 100 percent accurate or true, of course.
Although the emphasis is primarily on pop culture elements, there's still a strong showing of political lenses — so you can tell your boss, teacher or mom that you're not just wasting time, you're learning too.
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