I love this thing that we’re doing — the Web 2.0 thing, the social media thing, but especially the weblogging thing. The world is awash in expertise, and we have wasted ten millennia, at least, trying to effect our concentration, our innovation, through filters — would-be gatekeepers on the human mind. The smartest of the bunch of them have torn down their gates and used the iron to build bridges. The rest stoutly defend what’s left of their ravaged redoubts in a world increasingly devoid of walls. How stupid is that?
Witness:
- On Friday I beat up Inman news for coughing up “news” that everyone who is paying attention had already known for a week
- Today Michael Wurzer counts coup, needling Inman for hiding behind a pay-wall
- The New York Times can’t figure out why people will pay for information they cannot get anywhere else and yet won’t pay for information they can get everywhere else
- Meanwhile, the Times tears down its own idiot paywall and — surprise! — traffic surges
I swear to god these dinks think their value comes from wearing Oxford shirts or trading secret fraternity handshakes.
Here’s a sniggling little clue: If you know something worth knowing and you can communicate it in a timely and useful fashion, you’re our friend. If you decide to sneer your way into our hearts and minds, things might not work out as you’ve planned.
In fact, there is work that professional journalists can do that we cannot do as well for ourselves. But if they’re not willing to actually do that work, then what good are they?
Take careful note: Jay Thompson has been all over the management crisis at Point2 Agent. Since Friday, he has been the nexus of communications on the subject, reporting what he could discover and eliciting amazing anonymous comments from surviving Point2 employees. If you read Jay’s posts and the comments threads, you’ll be more richly informed than you could ever be by a news account.
How much more richly informed? At least 100%, since there haven’t been any news accounts about the Point2 diaspora. Where are the supposed “professionals”? Polishing their pince nez and practicing their superior poses, I suppose.
Here’s what so much worse: Who feels like they missed out on anything? When all you bring to the party is redundancy — often erroneously and always incompletely — and when show up late anyway — who needs you?
Learn how to work our way or learn something else. There’s nothing worth paying for in what you’re doing now.
But I am happy to send a virtually-cast medal, if not a minted coin, Jay Thompson’s way. For his extraordinary coverage of the Point2 Agent reorganization, Jay wins this week’s Odysseus Medal:
People find blog posts here on a regular basis when they search for terms related to “Point2 Agent”. That would be because I’ve made several posts about Point2 — my website provider.
But something unusual began happening this week.
On Tuesday, 4 people found this blog by searching “Brendan King Resigns“. Brendan is the Point2 COO. This search term leads to a post I wrote about the Point2 CEO resigning on Sept 20. Though it seemed quite odd, I brushed this off as people confusing the COO and CEO.
But the visits from that term continue to roll in…
And they have been joined over the past couple of days by variations of these search terms:
Point2 managers resign
Point2 exodus
Point 2 agent resignationsall of which return some Point2 related post written here.
Hmmmmm……. this sure sounds like something is going on up in Saskatoon……
In his testimonial for Monster.com, my pappy said, “I couldn’t even spell engineer and now I are one.” I have come to laugh at my posture toward vendors, with whom I have a relationship that runs the gamut from icy contempt to a warm and intimate ambivalence. And yet: Now I are one. Brian Boero takes this week’s Black Pearl award for Let’s call it Zulia. The only trouble is, Brian is missing about 80% of what can be done with this idea. I worked this out in detail about six months ago, and I can show you how to do something like what Brian is suggesting in such a way that it will put you completely beyond competition. There are only two problems: First, what I’m talking about is easier to do than it is to explain. And second, now I are one: I don’t plan to explicate this strategy until the BloodhoundBlog Unchained conference. Meanwhile, here’s Brian’s idea, which rocks notwithstanding:
I’ve been thinking that if I were to sell real estate in my neighborhood, one of the things I would do would be to create a comprehensive database of images, sales histories and notes on every single home in the neighborhood (in my case, about 1,200 homes).
In other words, I’d create my own private Zillow or Trulia — or, really, something even more valuable to my clients and prospects. Maybe I’d call it Zulia.
The data would be impeccably accurate, the images would be clear street level views, and it would be frequently and meaningfully updated. Each home would have its own page. Heck, I could even run this on WordPress. Every home would be a post.
But — and the real value would lie herein — all of the data, all of the images, would be complemented by my own assessment of the home. This might include observations taken on a broker tour at some point in the past (“next door neighbor raises German Shepards”; “living room gets very little light in winter”), or notes on sales prices that would make such data much more meaningful than a list of out-of-context comps. I might, for example, note that an unusually low sales price could be attributed an out of area listing agent, not a marker of a market shift.
The People’s Choice Award voting was spampaigned again this week, and it’s really put me off my stride. It’s plausible that the folks — never more than one a week — who are spamming their address books don’t stop to think that they are cheating. But if they did stop to think, I don’t see how they could avoid the conclusion. It a simple idea: “How would I feel if I were bested not by someone who worked harder and did better, but who had a larger warm network?” No one has any trouble identifying injustice when they’re on the receiving end. In any case, I’m not going to name a People’s Choice winner this week. And starting next week I’ll put would-be spammers on notice every week.
Nota bene: If you didn’t check out this week’s nominees for The Odysseus Medal, you should. And as always, if you trip on something so fascinating only a professional journalist could miss it, nominate it.
Deadline for next week’s competition is Sunday at 12 Noon MST. You can nominate your own work or any post you admire here.
Congratulations to the winners — and to everyone who participated.
Technorati Tags: blogging, disintermediation, Inman, real estate, real estate marketing
Brian Brady says:
Great work, Jay and Brian!
The spam-bots ruined a good thing, this week.
December 10, 2007 — 4:15 pm
Brian Wilson says:
Nice work, guys!
Jay – great investigatory journalism…bloggerism?
Brian Wilson, Zolve.com
December 11, 2007 — 9:21 am
Matt Carter says:
We would-be gatekeepers of the human mind are actually prohibited from polishing our pince nezes and practicing our superior poses on company time, Greg.
As most journalists will readily admit, we are vastly outnumbered by bloggers, and we can expect to get beaten on stories.
Bloggers can hit “publish” anytime they feel they have a tidbit worth sharing — without verifying its accuracy, putting it in a larger context, or seeking out other perspectives (that is a general statement and not a comment about anybody’s coverage of Point2).
However, journalists still feel needed — if not exactly loved — even by bloggers. Especially by bloggers. Imagine if instead of Hollywood scriptwriters, the writers on strike right now were the folks who gather news for newspapers, magazines and Web sites.
How many of the posts on your favorite blogs have their origins in news reports produced by professional journalists? What would the blogosphere look like without any news articles to link to or discuss?
As for why some news sites are still charging for their content — sure, news organizations could just give their stuff away, or let you decide how much it’s worth to download or link to an article (that’s working out great for the record industry, eh?). But if news outlets don’t figure out SOME way to make money, they can’t devote the resources to deliver the excellence that the public expects (or at least deserves).
Again, I am making a general statement; these are my own personal views as somebody who has made a living as a reporter for more than 10 years and I do not speak for Inman News.
If you want to argue that the quality of journalism — print, TV, Internet — has deteriorated in recent years, we can have an intelligent discussion. I think that may be true, at least in local markets where there has been a tremendous amount of consolidation that has wiped out the competition that improved the quality of coverage.
But I do get tired of your determination to pit bloggers against journalists.
Yes, blogs can provide insights that traditional journalism doesn’t. Not only because of the dialogue that’s created with readers (which, actually, is something many news sites have embraced), but also because bloggers have more freedom to share their own insights, which can make it easier for the reader to understand the importance of what’s being said.
Depending on the post, those same attributes can be drawbacks, and both formats demand critical reading.
As I said when commenting on your post “News on Wikipedia is everything the news industry is not,” (and I was paraphrasing a Wikipedia editor):
“Objective information is useful, biased information is not” (which, I complained, was something that seems lost on many bloggers).
https://www.bloodhoundrealty.com/BloodhoundBlog/?p=1609
In the hope of seeing some more debate on this topic, I will concede that point is probably lost on some professional news reporters, too.
Anyway, I’m sure you’ll agree that the consumer can decide who lives and who dies. Some will be hungry for useful information and new ideas that challenge their preconceptions (which not enough news outlets provide).
Others are looking for gossip, or commentary on selected facts that will validate their existing beliefs (which too many blogs are happy to provide). Hopefully there will always be news outlets and blogs that satisfy those extremes and everything inbetween.
December 11, 2007 — 8:24 pm
Greg Swann says:
> Bloggers can hit “publish” anytime they feel they have a tidbit worth sharing — without verifying its accuracy, putting it in a larger context, or seeking out other perspectives (that is a general statement and not a comment about anybody’s coverage of Point2).
Here’s the beef: The company policy is to court webloggers — which I regard as a pre-emptive waxed-fruit mau-mauing, since, so far, we don’t amount to a fart in a gale of wind in terms of traffic. So Inman has news about Dustin Luther’s job change — nearly a week after the rest of us had it. The “news” is gossip, in any case, but the whole episode simply reeks to me of pandering. If y’all actually worked our way, you would have known what’s going on. But since you don’t, you set yourselves up as an easy target.
Jay Thomspon was all over the Point2 Agent story many days before Inman News got there, and what Inman brought to the story wasn’t much, considering the delay. In fact, if you were working our way, y’all could have used Jay’s original post to bird-dog the news and you would have had the story last Friday instead of this Tuesday.
There is a bright-line distinction to be drawn, but it isn’t the one you’re looking for, prudent pros versus reckless amateurs. The distinction is whether people work our way, in the Web 2.0 world, or if they persevere in the past, waiting for the news to come to them in the form of easily-digested, pre-packaged PR pabulum. I regularly point out former MSM mandarins who have made the leap — Michelle Malkin, Mickey Kaus, John Cook at the PI. I’m not interested in quibbling about what they write. What is interesting to me is how they write. They live in our world, pulling news from all directions all the time.
Benn Rosales asked me in a comment if Inman News would be covering the BloodhoundBlog Unchained event. I have no way of knowing, but it doesn’t matter, either way. If “making news” requires issuing a press release, it won’t happen. But everyone we want to know about Unchained will find out about it with or without the “news.” You can provide a valuable supplemental voice, if you make a timely effort. But as with the Point2 story, if you miss the bus, no one notices or cares.
I don’t read Inman News — I don’t pay for ordinary information — but your posts are consistently the most interesting on the Inman weblog. Apparently, there is no one in the whole damn company who understands weblogging — your regular recitation here of Journalist Union shibboleths and canards about blogging is not the only giveaway — but you are good reading nevertheless.
Even so, I don’t have time to do what feels to me like talk-therapy — endlessly rehashing the death of monopoly-media filtration of the news. The future is people who work our way. Rather than detailing all the ways you think we are wrong, I think it might be worth your while to try to figure out what “amateurs” like Jay Thompson are getting right.
December 12, 2007 — 8:30 am