Join the Squid Police

Here is some food for thought: Is "Squidoo" A Dirty Word?

It may not be just yet, but it is starting to feel that way. Anyone who tries to use StumbleUpon, Mixx, or Digg to promote their work on Squidoo may already be feeling the burn of everyone else's bad karma.

A lot of the bad feelings are still lingering from Squidoo's first taste of Spam, and subsequent incidents of bad usership. Far too many people have come to think of Squidoo as a place for spam and irrelevant content.

And who can blame them? What if every time you searched for information via Google or Yahoo, you had to sift through dozens of pages of "Great Stuff on Amazon!", without finding the answer to your question? I know it bugs me when I'm looking for lensroll content, and that's all I find. It must be equally annoying for non-Squids who are trying to write book reports or learn new skills.

So what can we do about it? Bad behavior should be reported whenever it violates the Squidoo Terms of Use. Don't be shy. If you truly believe that a lensmaster is not on the up-and-up, it couldn't hurt for someone at HQ to check in on their activities. This way, we can help weed out those lensmasters that are making the rest of us look bad.

A One Sided Debate

I was browsing around on Squidom, and I came across a HeyMonkeyBrain lens by lensmaster sarahjjac, about parents getting away with letting kids die in hot cars. I'd been waiting to come across a lens to put in the "Lens that made me cry" section of my profile, and finally found it. Although I didn't truly cry, I did cringe - a lot - and hugged my baby fiercly after I read it. Apparently, in the US, being stupid isn't a crime. Even when being stupid results in the death of a child. People who leave their kids in the car on hot days don't get charged when they die, because they claim they 'forgot' that the child was even in the car with them. Who does that?? That's the kind of lapse that should last 30 seconds, at best, not long enough for a kid to bake in the sun.

Leaving a kid in a hot car to die IS neglect!! is such an important debate - although how anyone can side with the offending parents is beyond me. As soon as I was done participating in the Duels, I immediately lensrolled it to my Professor Baby series. I'm a big believer in criminal stupidity. People seem to forget that just because someone is charged with a crime, doesn't mean that they will go to jail. People tend to sympathize with negligent people whose stupidity and disregard for others results in harm and death, because they could see themselves getting into such a mess, and would hate to go to prison for it. I think that everyone who 'accidentally' harms someone should have to go through the legal system. A judge decides whether what they did - and how sorry they are for it - is terrible enough to warrant a prison sentence. That way, everyone has to be responsible for their own actions.

"I forgot I had my baby with me" my arse! If the baby sitter did it, you bet your left eye they'd be rotting in a cell, because the parents would see to it. So who's responsible for getting justice for a child when it's the parents who screw up? Apparently nobody! If you think this is an outrage, I highly recommend heading over to sarahjjac's lens and putting in your 2 cents. She's provided a lot of angles and queries to really drive home her side of the scale. It's my favorite HeyMonkeyBrain to date.