The Space Between

As a child, I lived in an older home that my parents were restoring. One of the features of the home that my father created was a huge fireplace that he made out of fieldstone. He went out to an old gravel pit in the country, he dug up a big pile of stones, and brought them back to our house.

To look at that big pile of useless stones, you wouldn’t think it was much except a big pile of useless stones. But my dad turned those rocks into a beautiful work of art that became the stunning focal point of our living room. (Insert nostalgic pause here). As my father worked, I discovered that the secret to turning a big pile of stones into a beautiful fireplace was in carefully placing the stones and then working on the spaces in between.

The web is like that, too. Websites and blogs and wikis are like the big pile of rocks. They are out there for people to visit but they sometimes lack context. They’re in a conceptual pile and don’t always fit comfortably together. In a way, that’s what web 1.0 was all about: "Digging up a pile of stones" by creating websites.

But now we have this pile of stones, what next? How do we lay them out so that they become a manageable and useable group of sites?

This is what web 2.0 is all about: bringing meaning and coherence to those individual sites by bringing them together… in a way, it’s about creating the spaces in between.

Sites like Plaxo allows users to gather and manage online identities in one place. So if you have a blog and a website and a wiki and a half dozen other sites, you can gather them together and keep the content in a nice, neat, publishable stream.

Squidoo is another site that has been created to fit nicely "in betweens" sites to bring meaning to the big pile of stones. Rather than hoping that our website and our blog will be understandable to consumers, we can create a Squidoo "lens" to help people find our information and understand it. Along the way we can add content, additional links, opinions, polls, and other interactivity.

These sites are huge for opportunities for business. They may not be something you’d use on their own (although there are some who do so quite successfully) but instead, they act as the space between to help us bring context and meaning to our web presence; and tie things together.

If you have a number of sites or blogs or wikis (or some combination thereof), and they all link back and forth, that’s great. That’s step one. But there’s an important step 2 that you shouldn’t ignore: The mortar.

Start with a Squidoo Lens. They are free and incredibly easy to create. You’ll be able to link to and from all of your other sites and provide a new way for people to find you, but a way that will also help them to understand what you’re all about before they visit.

Visit the IAC Virtual Assistant Squidoo Lens to see an example of a great lens in action.  You’ll notice that because IAC Professionals offers much more than Virtual Assistants (and probably more than the first things you think of when you think "VA"), the lens expands on their many offerings across the web.

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