I have been looking at some of the top Squidoo lenses over the last week, and I have noticed that most, if not all are so long, they are almost not useful. Which is kind of ironic considering that Seth Godin, as a blogging style, keeps most of his blog posts fairly short.
I know that Squidoo encourages people to write longer articles in order to make sure people aren't throwing up quick, spammy, one paragraph articles. In fact, I think Squidoo rewards longer articles with higher initial rankings. But somehow I think it has gotten out of balance.
Rather than creating quality, comprehensive articles, it seems that people are just stuffing in anything and everything they can think of on a subject in an effort to make the article longer and therefore rank higher initially. So rather than being focused, informative articles worth reading, they become obese, spammy smorgasbords of blahness chuck full of so many bits of loosely connected info, you could never consume it all in one sitting. And if you tried, it would make you sick.
Personally I prefer quality over quantity. I think Seth needs to rethink his ranking algorithm and base it on some quality metric and leave quantity out of it. In fact, discourage people from adding too much to an article.
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