Squidoo… my first lens

I built my first Squidoo Lens today… Pretty interesting.

If you have not heard about it the site is worth checking out.  It is a little bit like a blog in the sense that you are writting content about a topic that you hope others will find interesting and may have some way for you to monetize if you get really good at it (that is my perspective at least).  Squidoo topics can generally be very specific in nature and many of the post keep getting refined… I guess it could be described as WordPress.com meets WikiPedia meets Affiliate Marketing.

Here is a link to my first Lens (i.e. post in blog terms): What else can a Amazon Kindle do? and here is a screenshot:

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New Amazon Kindle Website

This morning I received an e-mail from Amazon regarding a new Kindle website:

“Dear Amazon.com Customer, 

Our customers have told us that they love being able to add highlights and notes to their Kindle books. We want to make it possible for you to access your highlights and notes directly from a Web browser too. So we’ve released http://kindle.amazon.com, an online tool that enables you to do just that.

To try it out, go to http://kindle.amazon.com, sign in with your Amazon account, and simply select one of your books where you have added highlights or notes.”

I think this will be a terrific feature… it help me get my notes and ideas off of the kindle and to the web, where I can make use of them.  Nice work Amazon!

Below if a preview of what my notes page for the Kindle 2 Cookbook looks like: 

 

The Kindle Difference

So I just read an article regarding the cost to build a Kindle.  I won’t give it away, but it also brought up the key difference of a Kindle vs other e-readers (or books for that matter).  The difference is the Whispernet wireless service that allows you to get content on your device wirelessly.

I cannot stress enought that this difference changes everything.  If you are thinking about a Kindle you have to understand this feature!  Basically for no monthly fee you have access to the Internet and the Amazon store (and yes other websites).  It is terrific being able to think about buying a book or magazine and then have it appear.  Instant gratification!  

I am also finding other ways to utilize the service.  For a $.10 fee you can email a pdf to Amazon and they will convert it to their format and send it to your Kindle.  I am starting to use this quite a bit when someone sends me something at work that I do not want to stare at my computer screen and read.  This is a great way to get through any “white paper” reading for your job.

First Impressions of my new Kindle 2

So I did not take the decision to buy a Kindle 2 lightly.  New technology is great, but I always think about how the price is going to come down in a year or 6 months.  There is also the fact that I have seen a number of “gotta haves” turn into dust collectors.  Some examples include the hand-held gps, iPod, even my Wii Fit is not getting much use.  Maybe I am fickle or maybe just busy.  Something really has to fit into the life I have and not the life I envision have.  Anyway back to the Kindle.

Amazon’s Amazing E-Book Reader

So what did I think… I love it… it takes something I do every day and makes it better.  I try to spend a hour reading in the evening every night.  I am mostly into non-fiction and magazines.  I like to be able to pick something up, jump around and put it down.  There is not a lot of continuity in my reading.  The Kindle is perfect for that.

 I subscribe to a lot of magazines where I am really interested in 30% of the content.  Blogs are actually much more focused and of more interest to me, but I hate reading a computer.  The Kindle lets me get to the content that I crave.  

The Kindle 2 comes with a whispernet feature that allows you to connect to the internet for free.  This is also how it downloads its content.  If you want to read blogs you have 2 choices:

1) You can subscribe for a month fee ($1 to $2 each) to a selection of several hundred blogs that Amazon offers.  

Pros:  

• All the content is downloaded to the Kindle and can be view when not connected or in airplane mode.
• There is a section list that easily allows you to browse the content.

2) You can point the Kindle’s web browser at a moblie reader app (eg Google Reader mobile) and use it to read any blog out there.

Pros:

• This is free.
• It is not limited content provided by Amazon.

I thought I would be all over the free reader application, but after a couple of weeks with my Kindle I am finding the latency, and lack of organization a big disappointment.  Have Amazon download all of the content to my Kinlde and give me a table of contents seems to be worth the extra dollars.

So to summarize, the feature that is really impressing me is the ability to get to blog content.  And I think the work arounds to get to the free content are probably not worth it, if the content is available as a subscription from Amazon.