Does Squidoo Require Articles To be Original?

You shouldn't have any problem. If you do, just re-write the article.

It should be okay, but you have to ask yourself...

What's the purpose of you putting it on both Squidoo and your blog?

Are you using Squidoo to get a backlink from a keyword anchor text to a specific blog page?

Or are you putting the article onto Squidoo, hoping to get some extra traffic that happens to be passing by?

My experience on Squidoo:

I backlinked my lens like crazy. Yes, I do get daily traffic to Squidoo and, on occasion, I get people leaving comments on my guestbook.

However...

I haven't really gotten sales from Squidoo. I've earned $7 from the adsense revenue, but that came from a separate lens.

Squidoo might do okay for Amazon products...maybe. But internet marketing stuff or other niches...I haven't had much luck with it. Maybe you might.

Reason? It could be that there's too many distractions: advertisements, text links and other stuff for people to click off to.

You're better off using the article on your own blog. Just post some relevant content on Squidoo with a keyword anchor text sending that PR 8 link juice straight to your corresponding blog page.

There's no duplicate content penalty, but putting the exact same content, word for word, on two different sites can weaken your link juice. Google spreads it out.

It's like putting too much water in the Kool-aid so it doesn't taste as sweet. You want your link juice concentrated. That's why all the fuss about unique content.

You can use copies of your own articles, but its best to rewrite it a bit. The quickest way is to rewrite the intro paragraph, making sure you keywords are near the beginning, then using those black box modules or whatever you want to use to add quotes relating to your niche or excerpts from customer comments and add a few of those between the other modules.

This would depend on what you want the articles to achieve if the articles are mainly for search engine, you would do well to rewrite them a bit, but if it just for backlink, you may not worry but don't you think your reader might be disappointed that they are reading the same thing all-over again if they click to your blog?
And most times the search engine determines the original content themselves and reward that site for the originality...

This might disappoint Squidoo die hards, but our own experience with them wasn't a great or rewarding one at all. At one stage we had set up three (?) lenses all with original content (written from scratch), the lenses were backlinked, rss, ping ... you name it.

They didn't make a penny! In fact, even the traffic was shabby. Maybe in the early days they were highly regarded as backlink strategy - I don't know - but I think they have lost a lot of their shine. Right now I cannot remember which even happened first but let's say we stopped promoting the lenses, and no sooner were they put up for suspension. We had to motivate why they should not be deleted! Just like that.

Lesson learned: it is not a quick turn on/turn off tap. Once again, you have to build reputation and credibility. Once again, if you have a couple of thousand lenses, maybe you can pay the groceries. Methinks they get flooded with spam and poor content that their judgement is sometimes compromised.