Online marketing guru Seth Godin will this month launch Squidoo, a company that will play host to web pages - he terms them lenses - created by experts on various topics and highlighting their views on those topics, with the hope that the distilled information they provide becomes the starting point for further research, reports ClickZ. The perfect "lens" would provide the "big picture" and provide annotated links to the most relevant sites on the topic - as a librarian might.

"Lenses as an idea will survive, whatever happens to Squidoo. This idea of boiling it down and giving people not everything [as searches do], but just what they need, has a rightful place at the table when people search," Godin told ClickZ.

Squidoo will be a co-op, with lens creators potentially sharing or giving to charity the revenues generated by AdSense text ads on the pages. "If a lens generates a couple bucks a day, and you build a hundred of them on a variety of topics, you could quit your day job. Hopefully, there will be a lot of people who'll do that, the way it happened on eBay," Godin said.