Hey, Who Grabbed My Plexo?

Squidoo limits the number of Amazon items per module to just five. Sometimes that just isn't enough. There is a way around it, though. If you want to show more than five Amazon products in a row at a time, consider using the Amazon Plexo module. (We'll get to the grabbing part in a minute.)

What's a Plexo module? It's a Squidoo invention that allows visitors to your lens to choose a favorite from a list that you created and vote it up (or down, if you allow it), thus adding a nice interactive function to your lenses. Plexos come in several Squidoo flavors including the Amazon Plexo, link list Plexos, text list Plexos, Flickr photo and YouTube Plexos, and even a guestbook Plexo where readers can "vote up" their favorite comments on your lenses.

Plexos are designed such that other Squidoo lensmasters can even "grab" your Plexo (it's okay, it doesn't hurt) and plop it into their own lenses or sites. At the bottom of this lens you'll find a Plexo created by lensmaster giddygabby, one that worked well for my lens but that I didn't have to re-create. Notice that giddgabby's name is there as the author, so traffic to my lens drives traffic to hers.

So, back to the Amazon Plexo. There's no limit (as far as I know) to the number of items you can include in a Plexo. So, if there are more than five Amazon items that you really, really want to include in a lens, then choose the Amazon Plexo and list away. Personally, I wouldn't get too carried away and make the list so long that your readers lose interest, but in many instances having the larger number just works better and even looks better on a lens than having multiple plain Amazon modules in a row. For example, on my Shirley Temple lens it really made sense to list all of her movie DVD's in a row and even allow others to add to it, vote up their favorite, or even grab the list for their own use, so that's what I did and I think it looks great. (Go take a look. I'll be right here.) So, what do you think?

If all this Plexo stuff still doesn't make sense, here's Squidoo's official explanation of Plexo for your learning pleasure. Do you use Plexo modules? Leave us a comment and tell us where, why, and how.