There’s always something to howl about.
Realtor, Tech Connoisseur
Take the time to participate in one of the many remembrances in your community.
They gave months, years, blood, sweat, tears and lives. Give them a few hours.
Celebrations will be held on Monday at Oakland’s Mountain View Cemetery, Alameda’s USS Hornet, San Francisco’s Presidio and USS Pompanito, and San Bruno’s Veteran Cemetery, among other places.
I usually use a dozen or more photos for EACH neighborhood, and want to include neighborhood name in each Alt Tag:
For Instance: Berkeley 4th St “what it is”
Berkeley 4th St Spenger’s
Berkeley 4th St Peets Coffee
Berkeley 4th St Amtrak Station
Will the repetition of “Berkeley 4th St.. ” in the beginning (or end) of the Alt Tag be considered keyword spamming if EACH of the 12 photos on that web page has an Alt Tag starting (or ending) with the same expression?
Ira
I used Batch Geocode yesterday to make a wonderful “quick and dirty” map of homes for a relo buyer
All it needs is Address, City & State.
Grab the info in Excel Format from your MLS Search, paste into the Batch Geocode Window, and it creates a great, scalable map with labelled balloons. The legend even includes the rest of the information from the spreadsheet data. WAY COOL.
Sorry if I’ve been a bit punchy – I think there’s a 9 hour time difference between Stockholm and Berkeley.. and those guys call on their schedule, so they woke me up in the middle of the night. This is a picture of my neighbor Albert, and he plays a role in the story … keep reading on.
The phone call came early this morning!
I’d heard the rumors, but was thrilled to find out that I received the 2009 Nobel Prize for Real Estate!
It was awarded for two different discoveries:
The Quantum Theory Of Home Buying and
The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of Real Estate
Quantum Theory
After a buyer writes an offer on a home, they either get the house… or they don’t get the house – there is no other state
Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle
The act of writing an offer on a home changes the home’s final sales price… even if you’re uncertain as to what the other offers are.
If there are multiple offers on a home, and you write a low priced offer, your probability of getting the home is very low. You affect the outcome, because someone who really wants the home will raise their bid and the home sells for a higher price!
And how does Albert Ghiorso fit into the quest for my Unified Real Estate Database Field Theory of Data Integration? He’s my inspiration.
Albert, one of our 90-something year spry neighbors, was co-discoverer of more elements than any other person in the galaxy! Albert’s Wikipedia entry lists the following elements:
* Americium ca. 1945 (element 95)
* Curium in 1944 (element 96)
* Berkelium in 1949 (element 97)
* Californium in 1950 (element 98)
* Einsteinium in 1952 (element 99)
* Fermium in 1953 (element 100)
* Mendelevium in 1955 (element 101)
* Nobelium in 1958-59 (element 102)
* Lawrencium in 1961 (element 103)
* Rutherfordium in 1969 (element 104)
* Dubnium in 1970 (element 105)
* Seaborgium in 1974 (element 106)
Cogito Ergo Blogo in Berkelium Californium Americium
Degrees Of Separation
I looked at the San Francisco Chronicle’s list of Bay Area Nobel Prize winners, and realized I was one or two degrees of separation from several…. one neighbor works with someone who won the award in Read more
“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.”
True, but if you want Google to wake up and smell the roses (or in my case, espresso).. you need to give them what they want.
Some documents need time stamps – yyyy-mm-dd-hh-mm-ss-what-it-is.xxx implicitly sorts in chronological order. 24 is too intense for me, but a great way to time stamp.
Most articles are best renamed with keywords. When we travelled to London, I created a PDF of the London Tube, emailed it to my iPhone .Mac account, and had a nice bright scalable map easy to read on my iPhone in dark, cold and wet London.
Here’s the file name I used:
uk_london_tube_map.pdf
I gives me everything I need to find the file on my computer. Being a digital kind of guy, I use the 2 letter International Internet Codes or State Code as a prefix.
th_bangkok_wat_pho_reclining_buddha_01.jpg
Back in ancient times (i.e. before taking the Bloodhound Unchained class last week), I would have used a more cryptic code, but Greg’s engenu batch creates ALT tags from the file name, so all my file names will now have embedded keywords for SEO juice.
th_bk_wp_reclining_bdh_01.jpg
But the bits are free.. no extra charge for using more of them…though I would like someone to tell me if I need to stay within an XXX character limit.
Adobe Bridge (Mac & Windows) is superb for organizing and renaming photos and movies.
More and more I simply create Adobe Acrobat files rather than print articles onto …. paper.
I love reading the New York Times .. Sunday print editions… and literally bookmark the page.
Then go to nytimes.com, find the article, use the full version of Adobe Acrobat to “Create PDF from Web Page”. I rename the page and save it.
By using Acrobat to create the PDF, the link are all active, the page is scalable (I can zoom in), and the PDF almost always looks exactly like the web page.
I’ve done extensive non-linear multi-variable regression analysis on sales in 17 different market areas across the United States.
Rather than provide you all the gory details, I’ll simply summarize the results.
In EVERY market, good and bad, city and resort, one thing was true.
100% of the closings involved a buyer.
So… rather than spending most of your resources (time and money) searching out sellers, build a strong Buyer Brokerage practice.
John Pinto of San Jose taught me a lot about working with buyers, so this post it dedicated to him.
I’ll be talking more about buyers from time to time… what I’d like to learn is what works for you.
