Brian Brady’s pick, Fight the power by Public Enemy (NSFW):
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Category: Disintermediation (page 20 of 43)
Daniel Rothamel offers up Frank Sinatra’s version of Paul Anka’s My way, citing these lyrics:
For What is a man? What has he got? If not himself, then he has naught. To say the things he truly feels, and not the words of one who yields. The record shows, I took the blows, and did it my way.
Okayfine. For my own part, I’ve always thought this song lays it on a little too thick, as the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll at his thickest makes plain:
Sid Vicious gave it a pomo send-up, but the tune just might be beyond parody:
I do like the idea, but I worry that the first-person protagonist might be too much a Walter Mittyesque legend-in-his-own-mind. And so I end up here, with Limp Bizkit, to me a more convincing expression of the sentiment:
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A BloodhoundBlog.TV broadcast of the praxis used to create BloodhoundBlog.TV broadcasts. Let’s get clicking, shall we?
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The real news from the mortgage and residential real estate business just keeps getting better.
First the 30% of investor or 2nd home sales went away. Then the 20% of the market that was the sub-prime business went away. Then the 10% of the market that was the alt-A business went away. Those numbers may not be exact but those are about the right percentages nationally. In the Phoenix area the number of true “investor sales” was even higher. Particularly in the edge communities where foreclosures have now skyrocketed. Yes, those very same edge communities where numerous builders sold 10 – 15 homes to each “investor” who wanted to buy them. Some of those subdivisions sales were primarily to “investors”. It is interesting to note that the amazing percentage run up in foreclosures in the Phoenix area is due to us having almost none a few years ago – back then everything could sell quickly. Drive through some of those neighborhoods on trash pick up day. Notice how few trash cans are out at the curb. (hint: a trash can at the curb = an occupied house)
In my opinion, the drop in sales from about 10,000 resales a month to about 3,000 sales a month in our area isn’t going to be a “temporary thing”. Most of those extra sales were fueled by low cost, no real need to qualify, money that never should have been available in the first place. Here I am referring to the alt-A, the sub-prime and the stated income (liar loans). It never ceases to amaze me how people with money can find (or is it the other way around) really really stupid things to “invest” in. If they had all of the facts available, I don’t know anyone who could have loaned money (their money) on 1st & 2nd liens, who would have made any of the 100% LTV sub-prime loans. No one who wanted to keep their money for later, anyway. Yet billions and billions of dollars were flooded into such “investments”. Now, after the horse is WAY out of the barn, they are really Read more
By way of Teri Lussier, Brad Coy hooked me up with an invitation to Seesmic, a video-based social-media start-up.
I’m interested for all of the foregoing reasons. I want something that can do to TV news what weblogging has done to print journalism.
This is my first Seesmic disturbance:
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Here is a selection from Brian Brady for the theme for BloodhoundBlog Unchained, Bruce Springsteen doing Born to run.
Opening line in the video:
“Remember, in the end, nobody wins, ‘less everybody wins”
and the last stanza of the song:
The highway’s jammed with broken heroes on a last chance power drive
Everybody’s out on the run tonight, but there’s no place left to hide
Together, Wendy, we’ll live with the sadness
I’ll love you with all the madness in my soul
Someday, girl, I don’t know when, we’re gonna get to that place
Where we really want to go, and we’ll walk in the sun
But ’til then, tramps like us, baby, we were born to runI grew up in Jersey so it biases my selection. If you’re 17, driving down Route 9 to Avalon, and Born to Run comes on the FM, you feel completely Unchained.
Got a different take? Assert yourself by email.
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Here is Teri Lussier’s pick for the theme for BloodhoundBlog Unchained, The Who performing Won’t get fooled again.
Got a different take? Assert yourself by email.
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So someone, somewhere in the alphabet soup of Realtor associations is selling my email address — or perhaps just giving it away. Realtors all over Phoenix are watching an idiot’s spam-fest, as one clueless victim after another tries to escape the spam spiral started by an agent who seems not to know that we discover properties for sale in the MLS system — that this is what the MLS system is for.
This by itself is nothing. I get at least a thousand spam emails every day. Moreover, I know that a lot of people in my profession get painfully flustered when they sit down at a computer — so worried they’ll make a mistake that they cause a disaster instead.
But I am sick to death of being “led” by morons.
Witness:
- ZipForms does not work. It is crap software written by crap minds, with its bugs exceeded only by its omission of rational options. It was rammed down our throats by idiots at the AAR who obviously do not themselves use it. And yet, come the start of the year, we will have no choice but to use this piece of garbage — a fate which includes the vast legions of the flustered and the flummoxed.
- And because ZipForms has not been a big enough disaster, the AAR is now preparing to ram a piece of transaction-processing software down our throats — which will almost certainly also be a piece of buggy Windows-centric crap.
- The idiotic gateway software in our idiotic MLS system has never worked in Safari for the Macintosh. We’re getting rid of that crap vendor, thank god, but it is of a piece with the way the chefs of the alphabet soup have operated, that nothing they have promoted, until now, worked properly on the Macintosh.
- They spam me, and they sell or give my email address to spammers — and they charge me hundreds of dollars a year to deliver my inbox up to this rape.
I don’t care that other people don’t thrive at my wavelength. That’s understood. But I do care that they use power I never ceded to them to Read more
This is my choice for the theme for BloodhoundBlog Unchained. Teri Lussier has a different idea, which I’ll share with you tomorrow. If you think both of us are all wet, say so by email, telling me what you think our theme should be. Be assured that there will be music. It it’s too loud, you’re too old.
This is Tom Petty again, covered by Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam. The song is I won’t back down — in many respects the theme song of my own life. Petty has hundreds of letters from people who turned to this simple little shit-kicker song for strength when they were confronted, by threats or temptations, with the prospect of betraying their own souls. I can’t think of a more important job for art to do than to lend people the courage to be who they are, damn the consequences.
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This is not a BloodhoundBlog Unchained theme, either, but it’s another move in that direction. When I met Jeff Turner and Dustin Luther at the NAR Convention, I talked to them about the idea of people who seem to oscillate at the same frequency, like similar isotopes.
I wrote about this once, a long time ago, because I think it’s a fun idea. Ours is a second-generation star, after all, so everyone you know, everything you’ve ever seen or touched is made of nuclear waste from an eons-ago super-nova.
I don’t believe in anything supernatural, and yet I can take note of circumstances where souls seem to harmonize instantly without having to be tuned to each other. I can say the same thing by talking about people coming from the same dirt or just smelling right to each other.
I grew up in Downstate Illinois, in coal country, and I feel a kinship with Teri Lussier — who was raised in Kentucky — that doesn’t require a lot of explanation. And while I’m a fast-talking, hard-charging intellectual entrepreneur — truly a mystery to the folks back home — I never forget the dirt that I came from. This is Southern accents, a Tom Petty tune covered by Johnny Cash. It’s about people who oscillate at a frequency I can always find. It’s about people who smell right to me.
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Click to the flick. There’s an MP3 version, also, so you can listen from your iPod if you want. Dan Green weighs in as well.
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Teri Lussier asked me if there would be a theme song for BloodhoundBlog Unchained. She later repented of the question, but she was more right than she knew. Of course there will be a theme song for the conference.
We are champions of iconic ideas, words and images and sounds and scents that communicate the same one message on multiple, parallel tracks. The goal is to say one thing that says tens or hundreds of things, all of which turn out to be the same one thing.
This is not the theme song for BloodhoundBlog Unchained, but it is very definitely a theme undergirding my own unchained life. This is Fiona Apple performing live this August with Nickel Creek (O, for a DVD!). The song is Extraordinary machine.
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I’m behind on these, but this is a good time to catch up. This is my column from the Arizona Republic from last week.
Real estate representation has never been about information brokerage
As I write this, the National Association of Realtors is holding its annual convention at the Venetian Hotel and Conference Center in Las Vegas. This year marks the 100th anniversary of the founding of the trade group, a cause for celebration.
But the NAR is also embroiled in a years-long anti-trust suit brought by the United States Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission. Real estate buyers and sellers are steadily migrating to the world-wide web as their primary communications medium, even as the housing market is suffering through an extended downturn in many parts of the country.
Of the challenges facing the NAR, perhaps the greatest is finding a path to relevance in the internet age. The group’s own statistics demonstrate that a steadily increasing percentage of home buyers and sellers are conducting their search for real estate information and representation on the web.
This internet-focused client base can be significantly more tech-savvy than many Realtors, with agents constantly racing to catch up. At the same time, Realtors’ presumed traditional value proposition, access to MLS listings, has been obviated by on-line MLS systems and nascent Realty.bots — venture-capital-funded internet start-ups devoted to delivering real estate information.
In fact, truly valuable real estate representation has never been about information brokerage — a fact both the Realtors and the Realty.bots seem to be slowly discovering.
The value a Realtor brings to a home seller is not the MLS listing, which is at best an administrative function. A skilled listing agent should advise sellers on pricing, preparation and presentation — the factors that get skillfully-marketed homes sold when no other houses are selling.
The best advice a buyer’s agent can provide to his or her clients comes not in a stack of MLS listings but in specific tactics to deploy during negotiations, inspections and throughout the escrow process.
Whether the NAR can sustain relevance into the twenty-first century remains to be seen. But, even though consumers may find Read more
We have a name, and we have the birth of a look:
We went through zillions of ideas — Brian and Cathy and I, our contributors, some commenters here, but mainly marketing guru Richard Riccelli. Richard came up with fantastic names — not just words but their graphic expression — but we went off and did things our own way anyway.
All of us were looking for a defining metaphor, an idea that encapsulates everything we are trying to communicate. Richard, to his credit, was much more benign toward our attendees. My position was that we built this place on attitude, and we need for people to understand that that attitude will be on the program — in essence will be the program.
The graphic look falls out from the metaphor, and, if the idea is the right one, everything falls out from the metaphor. Integrity is the state when every disparate thing is all one thing, when every different way of communicating ideas comes together to communicate the same one idea. I don’t know if we’ve achieved that here, but that’s the goal we’re aiming for.
We have an idea for a conference exploring a radically different kind of real estate marketing. You can learn more about it by clicking here.
We have an interest list that you can join so that we can keep you up to date with our plans by email. Append yourself to that list by clicking here.
We have dates: May 18th and 19th, 2008, with some advance fun on the evening of May 17th.
We have an insatiable lust for the most killingly perfect venue, but we don’t know yet if we can get it.
We are having preliminary conversations with the most killingly perfect keynote speaker, the progenitor of many of the ideas we champion.
And we have a name and a look and a big, bold, bad-ass attitude.
And there is much more to come…
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