Heath Row is the Senior Director of Community Development at Squidoo.com, a web service that enables users to create a centralized, dynamic depository of information resources concerning any topic of their choice. Beyond offering a good service for nonprofits to use, the company has a number of initiatives underway to support organizations working for social change.

Heath and I talked about how Squidoo works, how organizations can use it and his perspective on some of the underlying technologies the service uses.

Previous interviews here have often discussed the kinds of new roles that will emerge for people to play in a post-scarcity, always-on and on-demand information economy. Squidoo is a great example of a technological means of supporting some of these new roles and making them accessible to people other than the technological elite.

I began our conversation by asking Heath to explain the terms lens and lens master, used throughout the Squidoo site.

In the simplest terms, a lens is a page focused on a particular topic and compiled by a lens master. The lenses can include explanatory text, links to the best off site resources, affiliate links to sites like Amazon.com for recommended books, sections dynamically updated by publishing an RSS feed from elsewhere and much more.

Original research to find the best resources on a topic takes time. Squidoo helps centralize the fruits of that research in a publicly accessible way. As an example of how minute a topic for a lens might be, Heath told me about one of many lenses he’s created. After his interest was piqued in the topic of aromatic bitters, their history and industry, Heath did some research online and created a lens highlighting the best sources of information he found on the topic. Other lenses that have been created in Squidoo range from Contemporary Art Quilts to Marketing tips for nonprofit organizations.

"Not everyone is going to blog," Heath told me "blogging requires a time commitment on a long term basis. Everyone knows something about something, though, and they often want to share it." In addition to being open to all users who wish to contribute, Squidoo also includes a rating system whereby readers can report on the quality of a particular lens to differentiate the best ones on any topic for future readers.

I asked Heath how organizations could use Squidoo. He said that though large organizations have websites with resources running deep and wide, a Squidoo lens can act as an executive dashboard to quickly and easily show the newest and best information both internally and external to the organization on one web page.

 Heath told me that many of the users of Squidoo so far have been churches and teachers. One social studies teacher in the Bronx uses a lens to deliver articles, display news feeds, manage homework and increase the students’ interest in the class. Another teacher in Texas uses Squidoo to study A Midsummer Night’s Dream with her students. The students "farm" images from Flickr, write fictional news stories set in the time of the play and display the dynamic results of the project in a lens that acts like an online class newspaper for the Midsummer world.

I asked Heath why organizations were choosing Squidoo for these purposes rather than more traditional software like Learning Management Systems. He said that traditional software is far more expensive, has a much longer learning curve, is less flexible (see also Squidoo’s public API) and is often private - denying people the audience they so enjoy when sharing information.

If Squidoo lenses are public, I was curious how much freedom in branding users have. Heath told me there are co-branding options available, with custome modules and some elements (like logos) that can be made consistent across multiple lenses. The company is not currently providing the software itself, apart from their service, to customers. This means that a lens’s URL will be a Squidoo address.

I also asked Heath about their business model. He told me they do or are going to offer a number of revenue streams that will be split between lensmasters, Squidoo and a list of nonprofit organizations selected by their nonprofit advisory board.

The revenue comes from contextual Adsense ads on the lenses and affiliate modules with Amazon.com, a variety of superstores, Cafe Press and Netflix.

The most exciting part of Squidoo to me is the way it works with RSS. I asked Heath about his thoughts on facilitating adoption and legal/copyright issues in RSS.

"Eventually the RSS acronym will fall away," he said, "let’s make that happen even faster - people don’t care about the acronym."

lensmasters don’t have to be familiar with RSS at all to set up a dynamic lens. Squidoo autodetects the RSS URL for any page users enter the HTML URL for.

When the conversation moved to copyright and the legal standing of repurposed content from elsewhere appearing in Squidoo lenses, Heath offered the following responses:

• lensmasters hold the copyright on their own lenses, not Squidoo.
• Many lensmasters are putting Creative Commons on their lenses.
• Images, one of the most frequently borrowed forms of intellectual property, are uploaded from a menu in Squidoo that includes links to recommended sites to find rights free images.
• Text resyndication typically appears in summary form, which Heath says is a form of index level sharing and not plagarism. Attribution is, of course, always encouraged. I asked Heath about text resyndication and copyright in particular because I know it is a common concern amongst nonprofit organizations wary of repurposing text from other sites. In practice neither Heath nor I believed there was much cause for concern.

Heath Row is the Senior Director of Community Development of Squidoo.com. His lensmaster’s page is at http://squidoo.com/heath, where you’ll find his lenses on everything from Books by Douglas Coupland to books about Mardi Gras. To see the top 100 lenses, as selected by readers, you can go to http://www.squidoo.com/browse/top_lenses.