This site is so cool, it’s one of those “I should have thought of that!”

A long time ago, back in the 20th century, people used books such as dictionaries and encyclopedias to look up reference information. Now, sites like Wikipedia, Answers.com, and m-w.com can give you reference info online.

Similarly, a new website called SquidWho is offering what the Who’s Who books are doing - providing a reference source on people. Wikipedia is also a great place for this, but they moderate who is relevant enough to be on Wikipedia. That is where SquidWho steps in - there is no classification of who’s relevant and who isn’t. Everyone is relevant.

I came across this site from Seth Godin’s blog. It looks like Squidoo.com powers SquidWho, and it shows because the pages on the SquidWho site are visually appealing.

Since the site is new, it doesn’t have nearly the amount of content that Wikipedia has, but that doesn’t seem to be a problem. As a test, when I looked up someone who didn’t have a page in SquidWho but was on Wikipeda (I used Theodore Roosevelt), a new page was dynamically created by scouring the web, and an entry from Wikipedia was used as one of the sources of information. It seemed a little buggy though - at the time I did this test, I also looked up John F Kennedy and I got stuff on Princess Diana because there was an article that mentioned Princess Di and JFK in one sentence, and I guess that was enough of a hook that made SquidWho think I was talking about her instead.

Like Wikipedia, if there is no page that exists for a person, you can be the first author. Because of SquidWho’s automatic page creation, you don’t have a blank slate to start with but instead have materials from a web search already on the page, which is a very nice feature. So the question is, are you relevant enough to be a Who’s Who? (rhetorical question - the answer is “yes!”)