Some would say Seth Godin is a visionary. He's written several books on product marketing, knowing your customers and bootstrapping a business. Today marks the public beta of his latest project Squidoo, a wiki-like web site that is attempting to bring a human-focused organization to the problem of finding useful things on the Internet. The web site allows easy creation of a "lens", or a topic-centric page that is a pointer to other resources on the Internet. To keep the project going, ads are placed along side the lens with part of the ad revenue going to Squidoo, and part going to the "lenscrafter".

The system is currently seeded with data from the DMOZ project, with many, many lenses currently unclaimed. If Squidoo is well-received, watch for a land-rush to claim lenses.

My first lens is one on robotics. You can create a lens on any topic, provided it doesn't fall outside the terms of use. We'll have to see how all of these lenses shape the "visionary" title of Mr. Godin.