BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Egoism in Action (page 20 of 30)

April 24, 2009

Unchained Melodies: Here’s what our world sounds like to me tonight…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Everything I see lately of what was once so decisively “our world” just looks to me like intramural patty-cake. That’s as may be, by now. It is what it is. I am not in it. I am not of it. And I am quite a bit less interested in it than I was when this was still an avoidable fate. But I know — and in a year’s time everyone will know — that BloodhoundBlog is what’s left outside the walls of the Praesidium. We are free because we understood that chains can be forged from burnished gold and not just pig iron.

But I am a rude dude in a rude mood, tonight more than most nights. We’re four days away from BloodhoundBlog Unchained, and I am profoundly inspired by all that we are going to do. And I look around me and I realize that “our world” is what it has always been. It doesn’t matter who chose to kneel for those “glittering prizes and endless compromises.” All that matters — all that ever mattered — is who didn’t.

Here’s what our world sounds like to me tonight.

April 17, 2009

The epistemology of open-mindedness…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

In email to me this morning, someone said, “Your site is major-league high-brow.” I thought that was a funny observation, but I also know there is some truth to it. I don’t know that we’re all that high-brow-civilized, but we do try to take up ideas in a very penetrating way.

Epistemology — the philosophy of knowledge — how can you verify and validate your knowledge? — is an idea I’m always bringing up. There is no limit to how much better we can get at thinking.

This is a video I saw yesterday at Little Green Footballs. This is on-topic for BloodhoundBlog only in the absolute broadest sense, but BloodhoundBlog is all about looking at things in the absolute broadest sense. In any case, this is a very nice example of video doing an intellectual job that would be much harder to pull off in prose.

April 15, 2009

“Americans today are taxed at levels most of our forebears would have considered unthinkable. By our own nation’s historical standards, we are outrageously, insanely overtaxed. And yet we shrug our shoulders and say, well, at least we’re not France…”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The American Spectator:

How did it become “fair” for an American family to give to government a third of its income? How did it become “fair” for an American family to give to government half of its income?

When Parliament passed the Stamp Act in 1765, Americans had never before experienced direct taxation. They rebelled. In 1767, Parliament passed the Townshend Acts, which levied taxes on an array of British goods. The colonists responded by boycotting British imports. Parliament repealed most of the Townshend Acts in 1770 (except the tax on tea), and in 1773 passed the Tea Act, which essentially told Americans they had to buy their tea from the East India Company through government-approved merchants. Though the act actually lowered the cost of British tea, Americans were so outraged at Britain’s assertion of authority that they forbade tea-bearing ships from docking. And, of course, in Boston they threw 342 chests of tea into the harbor.

All of these taxes, by the way, were passed to finance the British Army. The newly independent United States taxed its people directly to pay off the war and ongoing conflicts with France, but in 1802, under President Jefferson, all direct taxation upon the American people was ended. That lasted for a decade, until we had to finance the War of 1812. That war was paid off by 1817, and Americans experienced no direct taxation from their federal government until 1861.

That means that “Manifest Destiny,” including James K. Polk’s war with Mexico, and the expansion of the country from coast to coast, was financed without a single direct federal tax being levied upon the American people.

The federal income tax imposed to finance the Civil War had two tax brackets — 3 percent and 5 percent — and was repealed in 1872. It remained off the books until 1913, when the 16th Amendment was ratified. The federal income tax rates in 1913 ranged from 1 percent to 7 percent. That highest rate applied to people earning $500,000 a year or more. Today, a married couple earning that much would pay a federal income tax rate of 35 percent, Read more

April 14, 2009

If you want to learn what we know — and to learn what we are learning — you’re coming to BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Okay, this is my last pitch for BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix. If you can’t figure out which side of the bread has the butter on it, you’re just going to have to wear a bib.

Here’s the deal: What we’re going to teach you, nobody teaches. We’re going to go hands-ons, step-by-step through the things you need to be doing to create a state-of-the-art marketing profile. By the time you leave Phoenix, punch-drunk and exhausted, you will have built yourself a brand new marketing profile — just in time for the real estate market to make its rebound.

We’re going to be together for 72 hours, and out of that you might sleep 15 hours. The rest of the time we’re going to be working — in eight three-hour hands-on labs and in between-class and after-class sessions where we can learn, think and grow together.

The goal is to build a scenius, a shared genius among the bunch of us, so that we all come away smarter and better-equipped to take on the wired world of real estate.

What are you going to get for your money?

State-of-the-art weblogging techniques, photography and graphic arts expertise, social media marketing acumen and the salesmanship skills necessary to make belly-to-belly conversions. (Excuse me: To Skin cats.)

On my side of the quad, you’ll learn search engine optimization and search-engine marketing, lead generation and management techniques, landing pages and a whole lot more.

Taken together, we’ll be covering every step of the real estate marketing process from the customer’s first tenuous investigations through first contact, incubation, the sales cycle and conversion.

And these classes will be taught by actual working real estate professionals who are actually doing this work in their own practices.

Like who? Mister Ubiquitous, Brian Brady, is the Dean of Marketing. He’ll be leading Linda Davis, Kristal Kraft and Sean Purcell on the content side of the campus. I’ll be serving as the Dean of Geeks, working with Eric Blackwell, Kelly Kohler and the inmimicable Ryan Hartman.

There will be other people speaking, including Mark Green giving a presentation on CRM marketing. And there will be a support staff of experts to Read more

April 8, 2009

The Inman Prayer: “Deliver us not into deliberation and tempt us not into leadership, for ass-licking for lucre is the kingdom, the power and the glory forever and ever, amen…”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

You just can’t make this stuff up:

Inman News is launching a new feature: Real Estate Product Reviews.

Would you like to be part of a team of real estate professionals that reviews and rates new real estate technologies, tools and services?

We want to hear from you.

I’ll just bet you do…

I loved this bit of reptilian reciprocity:

Imagine if the digital/virtual book (Vook) knew at what point you stopped reading, and then starting sending you Tweets from characters in the story up until that point, or giving you a tease of what’s coming up next. I can riff a bunch of ideas off this but my head is going to explode!

Amazingly enough, this harshly critical review of vacuous vaporware comes from a vacuous vaporware vendor who has suffered equally harsh treatment from Inman “News” — call it quid pro lizard.

Our whole world is out of joint by now, so much has the word “supportive” come to mean “promotional.” Drew Meyers is a sweet, sweet man, but this article is nothing but vendor-pimping. The vendor might well deserve the accolades, but, if so, why bury the lead? The post is not about SEO nor about a well-optimized web site. It’s about the vendor who built that attestedly well-optimized site. Hiding that fact reeks, in my opinion.

And it wouldn’t do to forget the best little PR3 weblog in Texas. Agent Shortbus is not a whore, and don’t you dare say it is! It’s more like a big-hearted, big-haired, round-heeled gal who just happens to like a Prime Rib before and a Blue Agave Margarita after. What’s so bad about that?!?

Diogenes might as well be Cassandra, I do understand that. But we are too much at risk of becoming entirely enmired in bullshit, to the extent that we can’t even smell it any longer. When Inman News, the high temple of the vendorslut religion, can pretend to do product reviews — that seems like a good time to tune into Radio Cassandra.

We have this thing, and maybe none but few of us have understood from the first how unusual it is for real estate professionals to live Read more

March 29, 2009

The mapmaker’s dilemma: What the hell are you doing with your time?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

That’s a screen shot of the user interface of the beta version of the mapping software I talked about on Friday.

This version:

  • Creates a Google Maps KML file from a list of street addresses
  • Assigns a user-selectable map marker to those addresses
  • Optionally creates a folder on the file server for that address — to serve as an engenu folder
  • Optionally creates folders and folder structures, thus to create an engenu hierarchy
  • Optionally builds links from the map markers to the individual street address folders

This is me writing to the Swallow Hill Gang last night, a very brief outline of features and capabilities:

Any valid addresses, one to a line, will produce a KML file that can be imported into Google Maps.

Like this, which is me and my best beloved:

314 East El Caminito Drive, Phoenix, AZ 85020

You’ll have the map marker you choose. I’ll be adding more.

If you select Folders, a folder will be created for that address:

“314_East_El_Caminito_Drive,_Phoenix,_AZ_85020”

If you select Links, the folder will be linked from the map marker.

If you select Links without Folders, neither one happens, for obvious reasons.

If you precede a line with a tilde — “~” — a folder is created, and subsequent address lines and their respective folders and links are created hierarchically. Like this:

~Top Level Folder

would create a folder at the top level named “Top_Level_Folder”.

This structure:

~Top Level Folder
314 East El Caminito Drive, Phoenix, AZ 85020

would create a link to a folder from the map marker for my house inside of the “Top_Level_Folder” folder, hence:

“Top_Level_Folder/314_East_El_Caminito_Drive,_Phoenix,_AZ_85020”

If you do this:
~Top Level Folder
~Top Level Folder/Second Level Folder
314 East El Caminito Drive, Phoenix, AZ 85020

You would get this:

“Top_Level_Folder/Second_Level_Folder/314_East_El_Caminito_Drive,_Phoenix,_AZ_85020”

You have to build each level of the hierarchy as you go. No harm, no foul if you try to create a folder that already exists.

You can do this:

~Love
~Love/Barefoot Boy With Cheek
314 East El Caminito Drive, Phoenix, AZ 85020
~Love/Barefoot Boy With Cheek/Girl Next Door
322 East El Caminito Drive, Phoenix, AZ 85020
~Love/Barefoot Boy With Cheek/Girl Next Door/And Baby Makes Three
402 East El Caminito Drive, Phoenix, AZ 85020

and you will have created what I hope will be a by-now obvious hierarchy.

If all you want to do is create a folder hierarchy, Read more

March 26, 2009

Reflecting upon the Obamanation: “Love of our brothers? That’s when we learned to hate our brothers for the first time in our lives.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’ve been thinking about the disgusting spectacle of millions of Americans presuming to have an opinion about whether or not some AIG employee deserves to be paid a bonus. This was once a country where the idea of minding one’s own business was virtually a sacrament. And then I can’t turn on the television without seeing some grandmother bragging that Medicare makes it possible for her to dine on her own grandchildren. And to top it all off, tonight I’ve been trading depressing emails with Joe Strummer about our progress down the Road to Serfdom.

I know people think they understand what I’m talking about, when I talk about political philosophy, but I’m pretty sure that’s not true. The simple truth is this: I am sovereign in my person — and so are you. I do not have the right or power or privilege or duty to push you around by force, and you do not have that right or power or privilege or duty with respect to me. That’s easy to understand when we’re only talking about we two: If I overstep the boundaries, you will surely help me find my way back to the righteous path. But there’s no difference whether we’re talking about two people or two billion people. Each one of us is free in our person, free as a necessary consequence of being what we are.

Does that mean that other people cannot try to push us around by force? Obviously not. It simply means that failing to respond to human beings as sovereign entities, each one of us a unique end in himself, is wrong — epistemologically incorrect, morally unrighteous, politically criminal.

All of economics is based in collectivist premises, which leads to statements that are true but fundamentally irrelevant. Smith taught us that leaving men free to produce is better for everyone — which does not matter, because each one of us is free regardless of the benefits freedom yields for other people. Hayek among others points out that enslaving us is bad for everyone, which also does not matter. The impact upon the collective is meaningless. Read more

March 14, 2009

Independence, for Realtors, comes from having a broker’s license

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This came up in a private discussion, but this piece of the pizza is a matter of interest for all Realtors. Ready?

GET YOUR FROLICKING BROKER’S LICENSE!

I don’t think I’ve ever said this in public, but I promise you it’s an oversight that should have been obvious all along.

Everything Bloodhound is about being as independent as you can possibly be.

That doesn’t mean you don’t engage with other people. What it means is never being in a situation where you have to put up with other people, whether you like it, hate it — or you want to kill someone because of it.

GET YOUR FROLICKING BROKER’S LICENSE!

A favorite game of dipshits who flitter into BloodhoundBlog is to pretend that they don’t understand what I am talking about when I deride vendorsluts.

Here’s a definition that will do no good at all: A vendorslut is a sleazoid who takes your money and gives you next to nothing in exchange for it — usually while binding you to an outrageously unfair contract.

And by that definition a huge number of real estate brokers are vendorsluts. Their entire business model is based not on selling real estate but on milking wide-eyed real estate agents for every penny they have, then dumping them as soon as they’re all milked out.

I can hope that no one reading this is some venal broker’s sucker, but that con-game is baked in the cake.

For that reason alone, you should:

GET YOUR FROLICKING BROKER’S LICENSE!

Obviously, I believe that your best move is to up your own organization, to turn your practice or your team into your own brokerage instead.

But even if you choose to work as an associate broker, having your broker’s license gives you options.

Yes, your legal liability increases, but, as with all advanced education, having your broker’s license brings with it significant marketing advantages.

And if your own designated broker moves on or gets sick, you have the legal qualification necessary to move into the big boss’s chair.

Perhaps more importantly, with a broker’s license, you are a bigger threat, should the big boss get the idea he might want to sever you.

And, recalling that Read more

March 5, 2009

If you’re in the Phoenix area on April 22 and you want to learn a whole lot about how to use Web 2.0 to promote your real estate practice — I’m in the Yellow Pages under chopped liver

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’m having an exceptional week.

On top of money work, I got the Universal Contact Form to the point where I can deploy new variations in seconds.

I’ve been playing Gooder games for fun — except the fun keeps turning into profit.

I worked out an algorithm for round-tripping data out of and back into Heap, making it possible to use rigorously self-populating forms to get existing databased prospects to scrub their own records. I did a small piece of this before Seattle, but I fleshed out the whole strategy this week.

That algorithm is general enough that it can be used to generate any kind of intelligent email: Any CSV file can become an email that uses a coded URL to self-populate a form that in turn produces other intelligent results: New database records, new CSV files, etc.

I hit upon — but have not yet implemented — a completely new way of organizing my sidebar at our Phoenix real estate weblog to make each WordPress Page its own quarterback in still more Gooder games — all of which, of course, are also Heap games.

I’ve been bugging Michael Wurzer at FBS Systems about making the FlexMLS IDX system responsive to coded URLs. If they will do this, I can build forms that can punch data into Flex just as I’m doing with Heap.

And today I worked out a way to take back the fattest third of the long tail from HomeZillTruGain at a cost in money and labor approaching zero dollars and zero cents. To the contrary, what I’m doing should actually pay us in added incremental SEO juice.

And the funny part is, I have two other long tail strategies that, so far, I’ve only implemented in pilot projects because those two do require a modicum of labor and I just don’t have the time to throw at them.

My thinking is that, by the time I’m done, I can plant three sloppy Bloodhound kisses on the first page of the SERPs for maybe 2,000 long tail keywords — maybe more.

And that’s just the stuff that I’m thinking about right now. The first quarter of 2009 Read more

March 3, 2009

Tell Todd Carpenter to stand down. “The Social Media Marketing Institute” is how the RE.net will be sold to the NAR.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

As Monsignor Cecil used to say: Oh, my sweet, suffering Jesus… And in echoing that exhortation, I am doing something none of these “experts” can do in return: Giving them a link from a PR5 weblog.

I would eviscerate the writing style on the web site, but it’s too painful to look at. Okay, just a taste, but you asked for it:

The designation course is the first of its type with relevant content-rich material and cutting edge techniques utilized by these Social Media pioneers.

They left out all the relevant content-poor material, along with the stuff that was content-rich but irrelevant, thus to leave more time for utilizing cutting edge techniques.

Evidently commas are not on the cutting edge, but they wouldn’t help, anyway. As we have discussed before, “Neither can his Mind be thought to be in Tune, whose words do jarre; nor his reason in frame, whose sentence is preposterous.” People who write badly think badly. You permit them to enter your mind at your own risk.

I don’t mind these self-made mediocrities — all of them, not just this crew — chasing people away from here. It works to our benefit: We end up talking only to people who can keep up with us, a boon for everyone. But I can only foresee two futures for a stunt like this:

First, they will milk the punters with a second-rate curriculum. This by itself is hardly rare.

And, second, they will sell this lipstick-slathered pig to the NAR, where it will ossify — which is not to imply that it is, even at present, timely or relevant — or worthwhile. Given some of the people involved — and the recommendation to buy a Kindle! — I would expect the opposite.

But disappointing people don’t disappoint us — when we have our minds properly inverted. Consider this, from the “Affiliate Links” section:

In some cases, we have also negotiated a “commission” to SMMI as well.

Yours is not to ponder oughts, yours is to be sold and bought.

Drop me a line when you get sick of being the entree at the Feast of the Vendorsluts.

February 26, 2009

We know sheep will follow a Judas goat to their slaughter, as will cattle. Now the NAR is testing the idea on lemmings…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Todd Carpenter becomes one with the Borg and the charming little lemmings elbow each other out of the way to dive off the cliff head first.

One of two things will happen: Todd will discover he’s made a terrible mistake and will quit this job with dispatch — I hope very loudly. Or: Todd will deliver us to our slaughter.

Anyone who expects anything other than evil from the National Association of Realtors has either not been paying attention, or, much worse, embraces that evil.

In any case, this is not something to be celebrated, not even to affect to be “nice” in chorus with the rest of the lemmings.

The NAR may want to infest our world in order to destroy it. More likely, they want to take it over.

What they certainly do not want is to approach the public as we do — openly, authentically, concealing nothing. The entire edifice of residential real estate is founded on secrets and lies, and, as long as it is, the NAR will be nothing but a cesspit of tyrannical motives and vendorslut con games.

And — more is the pity — Todd Carpenter cannot take their money without being their shill and their Judas goat — or worse.

I’m saddened by this, because of all the gutless big-name real estate webloggers, Todd has more guts than most. But nothing good for us will come of this, and the only good that can come of it for Todd is for him to escape with his scruples intact as quickly as he can.

February 24, 2009

Quietly going about our business

by

Rust Belt Realtor

Author website

We go about our business, most of us, very quietly, with an attempt at dignity. One foot in front of the other, moving forward, striving, reaching, yearning to be the best we can be. We want to provide for our families, do right and do well for our clients. We want to put our heads down on our pillows at night, satisfied with the day’s work, and wake up the following morning excited to do it all again.

We don’t, most of us, want to be rock stars in the blogiverse. We want, most of us, to be appreciated for what we can offer, allowed to give freely without grief, and left to go quietly about our business.

I don’t agree with everything written on real estate blogs, and I don’t much like some of it, but the people who read these national blogs, the people I meet at Unchained, and the real estate professionals who email me to share their own triumphs- these people are inspiring. They are just like me, quietly going about our business, picking up information like sponges, moving forward, learning, striving, laughing, loving- just people, just real estate agents (without big hair).

I’m disturbed by the idea of a NAR Social Media Director, when I think about it. But the thing is, I don’t think about it. I don’t care. I don’t wish the new SMD any ill will, I don’t wish them anything at all because it really doesn’t matter to me. By the way, I’m going to call this position The SMeD, just because it makes me giggle.

So The SMeD will have a job to do, but none of it matters to me because I have my job to do, and as Greg points out, “All we have to do is keep doing what we’ve been doing — and keep getting better at it — and the Boojum under the bed will be gone forever.”

I’ve always believed this, and it’s always proved true. Anything that we have given power to, in our own minds, can easily be dethroned, defrocked, destroyed, by doing exactly what we do so Read more

February 22, 2009

As the NAR makes its first forays into the participatory internet, wired Realtors must get a handle on a very difficult question: How do you get rid of the Boojum under the bed?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Okay, so the National Association of Realtors has made a big deal out of its search for a “Social Media Director.” Apparently I’m the only person who finds the terms “social media” and “director” to be inherently self-contradictory, but that doesn’t matter anyway.

Why? Because the NAR is interested in social media for two reasons only, neither of which will resonate with anyone in our world.

Their two objectives are these:

First — and primarily — they want to clamp down on and control everything associated with real estate in the participatory internet. Dinosaur organizations are censorious by their nature, but the NAR is very much like the Mafia in its need to control its message, silencing dissenters and whistle-blowers.

Second, the NAR wants to turn the Web 2.0 world into yet another distribution channel for treacly, sleazy sales propaganda.

I never thought of Pinocchio as a wise-guy before, but it comes to the same thing. You can’t get too near The Boys without becoming one of them, and if you lend any part of your credibility — your reputation for moral probity — to the NAR, it will turn you into yet another insipid, perpetually-smiling marionette. Dance, puppet, dance!

I think this might be a three princes fable. If it is, the first prince may well be Todd Carpenter, who for some insane reason actually wants this job. At least he had better want it, because he gave me as a character reference and I gave him a glowing review. If the NAR actually understands its world and ours, my recommendation should have worked the other way for Todd. But my impression was that they ate it up.

Prince number two is NAR CEO Dale Stinton, who has announced that the new Social Media Director has already been chosen, but who won’t reveal who is the poor benighted soul who will get to be torn to shreds by both the lady and the tiger, never knowing for sure which is which.

I don’t actually know who the third prince is, but for the moment I’m betting on me. I abhor the whole idea of leadership, but serving as Read more

February 19, 2009

Max vs. The 1000-Pound Gorilla

by

Free Market Cowgirl

Author website

Meet Max. He’s the cute little mascot for Homegain.com

Meet The 1000-Pound Gorilla (Hint: It ain’t really move.com Those are really fists, codename: Thunder and Lightning)

This is Max telling me about the advantages of Homegain.com over on my Active Rain blog.

(about the fourth comment down: Louis Cammarosano)

This is a link to the winner of the competition.

His account was suspended for violation of AR’s Terms of Service (advertising in the comments of another blogger).

Yeah right. Looks like somebody went a bit Ape Sh*t over a major competitor talking to a friend (me) about the value of their company on my blog.

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Inventing Real Estate 2.0

Welcome to BloodhoundBlog, the national real estate industry marketing and technology weblog written by, for and about real estate professionals. Better yet, welcome to the wired world of real estate. We are busily inventing Real Estate 2.0 – technology, marketing, service and salesmanship. Like all Bloodhounds, we are smart, frisky and fiercely independent. We've built a spot on the earth – beloved over all – where each one of us can be who we are, no matter who that might be. We are committed to an idea of excellence that will flush the bums, the con-men and the crybabies out of the real estate industry. If you yearn to have your failures excused, your moral lapses absolved or your boo-boos kissed, seek elsewhere. But if you are sick to death of mediocrity – welcome home. Read all about us, subscribe to our feed and steel yourself for the hunt. We work hard, we play hard, we learn everything we can – and we bow to no one.

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