I’ve been playing around tonight with a new piece of social software called “> Squidoo that came recommened by “> George Seimens in his email list.

“> Squidoo is an example of a tool that acknowledges “everyone’s an expert on something”. Once you’ve subscribed to this service you are able to set up a “lens” that filters/aggregates content from numerous sources (RSS, technorati, flickr).

The underlying idea is that as each of the domains of knowledge become more complex, there’s no way that any one person can know it all. Instead, the complete picture is held in the viewpoints of everyone in that space – including you! It is the aggregation of these viewpoints that establishes the knowledge base of the particular field.

“> Squidoo is an example of one category of social software tools – those that aggregate content, the other category being those that create or maintain connections between people. Like del.ocio.us , Squidoo uses the notion of a “cloud” of words (tags) to represent the different “lenses” that have been created, and caries the size of the text of different words in the cloud to illustrate the most popular lenses.

This sort of social software is only in its infancy, but it is certainly exciting to see the number of new tools that have emerged in recent months. Watch formorrre to come!