As the web continues to grow, finding the really good stuff becomes more of a challenge. But there are road maps available, made by people with local knowledge — specialists and enthusiasts itching to show you their favorite web sites.

We are talking about a new genre of web community where you or I or anyone who feels like it can create topic based gateways to the web. Once upon a time there was About.com the and Open Directory Project (ODP) where voluntary editors edited submissions to the directory. But the number of editors was relatively low and it was considered a decidedly geeky hobby to be an editor.

These new web sites have thousands upon thousands of “editors” — people who make portals or lenses or spots to present the very best web sites and resources on a topic where they have some expertise or enthusiasm. You can see the web through their eyes and find great content on almost any topic.

Squidoo
Squidoo is a network of so called lenses — single page blogs that highlight a person’s recommendations or expertise. Anyone can make a lens and the lenses present any kind of topic from business intelligence to breast feeding.

The idea is not primarily for the lenses to hold content. They recommend or promote content on good web sites out there. The way these sources are combined and annotated is what potentially makes a lens a gateway to good web content.

Users who create lenses are called lensmasters. Lensmasters provide links, feeds, abstracts, and lists, helping you to make sense of a topic. Lenses often point to Amazon books, Flickr photos, YouTube videos, Google maps, blogs, and more.

Lenses are rated by other users and also ranked by popularity, so the highest ranked will be the most useful, and the lenses with poor content will sink to the bottom.

Squidoo splits its revenue with the lensmasters. 5% goes straight to charity, 50% goes to the lensmasters and 45% goes to Squidoo. About half of all the lensmasters are donating their royalties to charities.

Zimbio
If you are a regular reader of Pandia, you already know Zimbio. It is a site that allows users to make their own open topic portals and private extranets. Like About it presents topic sub-sites with articles, links to relevant sites and discussion forums. Hence these sub sites are more than plain web directories, but less than complete web sites.

Each sub site or portal on Zimbio includes photo albums, headline feeds, links to articles and news, and a group blog and forum. Anyone can contribute to the Zimbio sub sites. In this respect Zimbio is more like wikis like the Wikipedia, sites where users write the content. Read our review of Zimbio here.

Fanpop
Fanpop is not essentially a fan site, it is a place where people with special interests gather in groups to share and rate links, participate in discussions, read news headlines and more. Fanpop! is actually a steadily increasing collection of portals, called fan spots. You can search for spots, join spots or make your own spots on anything that takes your fancy.

Every fan spot has a links tab where you can add, tag, rate and comment links. You can also report a link as spam, broken, outdated, duplicate or miscategorized. The link feature is by far the most popular, but every spot also has relevant news headlines and the option to start a forum discussion. Read Pandia’s review of Fanpop.