by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’ve already been to sleep once, briefly. After Unchained broke up this afternoon, we came home to knock out the essential work. Teri Lussier cranked out a solid hour of video clips today, so I started pumping those into the YouTube mill. I’ve got a lot more to talk about, but first I have to go to sleep.

So first: The news.

Glenn Kelman gave a knock-out keynote speech. He spoke about Redfin.com’s recent performance, as compared with the company’s initial assumptions, and we all came away with a better understanding of how more alike our businesses are than they are different.

When Glenn finished speaking, we announced that he will be joining BloodhoundBlog as a contributor. This is a stone obvious idea that should have occurred to me a year ago, but, in fact, it only came to me last week. We’ve talked to other bigfeet in the realty.bot and franchise worlds, but, where the flesh has been willing, the PR department, until now, has always turned out to be weak.

I think Glenn made a lot of friends for Redfin today, and it certainly was an honor to have him with us. Whatever differences we might have had, he’s a fine writer and a thoughtful man, so it will be interesting reading him here.

The other news was Brian Brady’s announcement that we will be doing another Unchained event in Orlando, Florida, at the time of the NAR Convention. We don’t have a date or a location yet, but it will be right around Friday November 7, 2008. We want to be there to catch the Realtors before they rush into the convention center to spend a ton of money on hokey gimmicks that won’t work. This seems like an appropriate mission for a couple of wannabe Jesuits.

Teri’s videos are chugging along, and I’ll get around to tagging them tomorrow or Thursday. Feel free to watch them anyway, as they get uploaded. In the mean time, here is Brad Coy doing what Cathy says is a spot-on imitation of me:

And just to share the love, Brad also gave a parody performance of Brian Brady:

Technorati Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Brian addresses the art and science of Web 2.0 ubiquity.

There are several other clips from this session on the BloodhoundBlog Unchained YouTube Channel.

Technorati Tags: blogging, BloodhoundBlog Unchained, disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing, real estate training, technology

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This talk is a further elaboration on a post I wrote in April:

There are several other clips from this session on the BloodhoundBlog Unchained YouTube Channel.

Technorati Tags: blogging, BloodhoundBlog Unchained, disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing, real estate training, technology

by Odysseus

Big, Beautiful Bloodhound

Author website

We’re Unchained, but we’re still wired to the net — wirelessly. These posts are set up so that folks can make notes or comments in real time.

Mary McKnight of RSS Pieces will review and suggest improvements to several web sites and weblogs:

• Mary Burak’s Advanced Access Site
• JTC Realty Group’s Point2 Site
• Gulf Coast Associates’s RealEstateWebmasters Site
• Patti Herrington’s AgentImage Site
• Karen Borden’s Z57 Site
• Just for fun: BloodhoundRealty.com’s WordPress Site

Plus a surprise debut of a brand new blogsite for an RE.net mandarin

Technorati Tags: blogging, BloodhoundBlog Unchained, disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing, real estate training, technology

by Odysseus

Big, Beautiful Bloodhound

Author website

We’re Unchained, but we’re still wired to the net — wirelessly. These posts are set up so that folks can make notes or comments in real time.

• Listing strong to farm strong
• Building single-property web sites
• Using engenu to dominate the long tail
• Zestifarming to dominate Zillow
• Blogging your listings – with SEO power
• Belly-to-belly farming the Web 2.0 way

Applying Web 2.0 technologies to the the traditional real estate marketing idea of the geographic farm. Greg Swann will take you through a set of techniques you can use to establish an online ubiquity more complete than you could ever achieve with postcards and pumpkins.

Technorati Tags: blogging, BloodhoundBlog Unchained, disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing, real estate training, technology

by Odysseus

Big, Beautiful Bloodhound

Author website

We’re Unchained, but we’re still wired to the net — wirelessly. These posts are set up so that folks can make notes or comments in real time.

• You are free at last, a free moral agent with no one to order you around — but no one to blame but yourself if you should fail
• You are free to thrive
• You are free to starve
• But you are not free to escape the necessity of making a choice

An introductory convocation from Greg Swann featuring philosophy, history, stirring rhetoric and some really scary homework…

Technorati Tags: blogging, BloodhoundBlog Unchained, disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing, real estate training, technology

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Colleen Kulikowski sent me a sweet card wishing us success with Unchained. Enclosed was a packet of Aster seeds. If I can get them to grow, I’ll take pictures.

Tom Royce sent an email note telling us to break a leg.

Kevin Warmath needs a roommate for Unchained. If you haven’t bunked up and want to split costs with a man who swears he’s not a Neanderthal, give him a call (678-438-3041) and work something out.

My post on transparency was picked up by my long-time friend and client, Richard Nikoley. Richard runs Provanta, a debt-reduction company. Partly owing to my influence, they’ve just switched their on-line presence over to a WordPress blogsite, putting them squarely in the warts-and-all Web 2.0 world.

I said this in email to Richard, an Unchained epiphany all its own:

What’s interesting is that everyone in our world shops this way: Full research, full knowledge of the pros and cons of everything. We might be at the right edge of the learning curve, but it’s all the same curve. Everyone is on it, and everyone is moving our way on that curve. Why would we market any way but as a reflection of how we shop?

Think about it, and I mean think about it a lot: Why would we market any way but as a reflection of how we shop?

That post was also picked up by The Innkeeper’s Resource, a blog for Bed ‘n’ Breakfast innkeepers. Their take: Anonymous reviews are a reality of their business. Get used to it. I offered this in a comment:

Brilliant.

Here’s an idea that can work in any industry that can be hit with an off-site review:

“When Mark and Marie Olson complained about our threadbare linens on TripReports.com, we saw red. Not because the charge was false. It was true, alas. We had let ourselves become so distracted by the big picture of providing a great experience for our guests that we forgot that big things are made up of little things. Not only did we add a quality control procedure to our laundry, we built quality control into every aspect of our business. And we gave the Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Using Eric Bramlett’s green ribbon and a little bit of PHP, I have built a small widget to keep track of the accumulating body of weblog posts on Trulia.com policy of adding the “nofollow” tag to links back to its listing partners. Shown below is an image of the widget; you can see the real thing in the sidebar.

You can read the articles linked in the widget for clarification, but the issue in its essence is this: Trulia is using the listings you give it to enhance its own search engine performance on long tail search keywords even at is not sharing any search engine authority with you on the link back to your listing. Another way of saying the same thing: You’re buying Trulia.com dinner and it is scarfing down your dessert while you’re away from the table.

If you’ve written a post on this topic, let me know and I’ll add your link to the widget.

If you care about this issue, you should echo this widget. It’s easy to do. The widget itself is not complicated, and I built it to be shared. It’s designed to work flexibly in your sidebar without clashing with your look and feel. In other words, it should take on the characteristics of your Cascading Style Sheet, not mine. If you want to echo this widget, it’s dread simple. Copy this line of code:

<?php
include ("https://bloodhoundrealty.com/BloodhoundBlog/TruliaTracking.php");
?>

and paste it on a line of its own in your “sidebar.php” file for your currently active theme. FTP that into the appropriate folder on your file server and you’re done. (Note: These instructions presume WordPress and an FTP connection. If you know how to deploy this code in another blogging platform, or if you know how to edit theme files from within WordPress, speak up in the comments.)

Will BloodhoundBlog get Google “juice” for doing this? Yes, but we don’t need it. Instead, I’m using my code and my hot-rod file server to host this widget for anyone who wants to echo it.

Will the posts linked in the widget get Google “juice” for being there. Big time. Riding on BloodhoundBlog’s sidebar Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Galen Ward’s post on Trulia.com’s policy of adding “nofollow” tags to links back to its own listings partners has elicited quite a bit of controversy.

The original post itself excited a great deal of commentary, and this is explored in encyclopedic detail in a fascinating post by Union Street Media’s Gahlord Dewald.

Trulia.com’s Rudy Bachraty participated for a while in that comment thread, then elected to take the respondent’s side of the debate back to Trulia’s home weblog, where head honcho Pete Flint made an effort to put out the fire. Comments there have been noticeably light, which made me wonder if Trulia has learned ahead of the curve why video commenting is a stoopid idea.

The story was picked up by Inman News today.

I am in the perhaps unique position of being just barely smart enough to explain what’s going on within what might well seem to others to be a blizzard of jargon.

Start here: I observed that Trulia is achieving truly amazing long-tail search results.

Galen pointed out that an ancillary reason for this is that Trulia is not allowing search engines to “follow” its links to its listing partners.

In other words, you — or your broker or your brokerage chain — feed Trulia.com a real estate listing, the primary content it uses to sell advertising. That listing will link back to its source (in hierarchical order: brokerage chain, broker, then lowly you if neither of the others is coming between you and your listing). But that link will include a “nofollow” tag, which means that when search engines see that listing page on Trulia, they will not queue your own page for spidering, nor will they in any other way regard that link as lending any strength to your page.

In still other words, Trulia is happy to feast on your crackers, but it’s not about to share any of its Google juice with you.

Trulia’s claims about why it is not doing this are specious and bogus, in my opinion, but you can read their side of the story at their weblog.

Does this actually matter? I think so, for two reasons. First, the Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Michael Wurzer at FBS Blog fingered an astounding exposition by Clay Shirky on the impact participatory media will have on us all:

This hit me in a conversation I had about two months ago. As Jen said in the introduction, I’ve finished a book called Here Comes Everybody, which has recently come out, and this recognition came out of a conversation I had about the book. I was being interviewed by a TV producer to see whether I should be on their show, and she asked me, “What are you seeing out there that’s interesting?”

I started telling her about the Wikipedia article on Pluto. You may remember that Pluto got kicked out of the planet club a couple of years ago, so all of a sudden there was all of this activity on Wikipedia. The talk pages light up, people are editing the article like mad, and the whole community is in an ruckus–“How should we characterize this change in Pluto’s status?” And a little bit at a time they move the article–fighting offstage all the while–from, “Pluto is the ninth planet,” to “Pluto is an odd-shaped rock with an odd-shaped orbit at the edge of the solar system.”

So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, “Okay, we’re going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever.” That wasn’t her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, “Where do people find the time?” That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, “No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you’ve been masking for 50 years.”

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the Read more