I beta-tested Squidoo and was quite disappointed. I think it's fundamentally flawed.

Most people are going to put up links to information that won't change much (ever?) once they're in place. Many links will soon become out of date (link rot).

The easiest way to update content is from one's own blog (or other people's RSS feeds) - but then how is that an improvement over having one's own blog in the first place?

NB Squidoo is not a blogging tool, so you wouldn't think of, say, transferring your whole blogging activity there.

But the main failing seems to be that, as a list of links, text content and incoming RSS feeds, it fails because it's so easy for any one lensmaster to clone the successful lenses. How, then, can any one lens financially outperform any other (which is main reason to participate)?

I think as far as expertise aggregation goes, search engines that find content from existing blogs look like a better model - see iNods http://www.inods.com

agree, did beta testing coz liked the idea and read the e-book, delivery is disappointing for me