BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Technology (page 20 of 60)

December 11, 2008

BloodhoundBlog.net can map domains: Your free real estate weblog can look just like you’re hosting it yourself

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

It took some time to work out all the kinks, but we’ve got domain-mapping working on BloodhoundBlog.net.

What does that mean?

You can set up a free BloodhoundBlog.net weblog, say, something like myblog.BloodhoundBlog.net.

Then you can go to a domain registrar like Godaddy.com and register your own domain, perhaps MyOwnDomain.com. You don’t have to buy a hosting package or anything else, just the domain.

Then, with a little help from us, you can set up MyOwnDomain.com so that it displays myblog.BloodhoundBlog.net.

From the point of view of both your users and search engine spiders, your weblog is hosted at MyOwnDomain.com.

Here’s an example, a melancholy celebration of Dayton by Teri Lussier. The blog is built on BloodhoundBlog.net, but, because of domain-mapping, it looks like it lives on its own server.

WordPress.com charges $10 a year for domain-mapping. We’ll do it for free — with the stipulation that you really are a hard-working real estate blogger. If you’re really pounding out the content, we can help you customize your blog’s theme, too.

Between money work, web work and WordPress work, I’m coming and going, but we have a lot of cool announcements coming up. Stay tuned…

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December 9, 2008

Marketing the praxis of a Scenius thoughtfully: How can we use dynamism and triangulation to play tunes that make the spiders dance?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Teri Lussier paid me a very high compliment today in email, although I’m sure that’s wasn’t her intent. I expect she was just being matter-of-fact. Here’s what she said:

You don’t do anything without a purpose.

She was asking why I phrase so many headlines in the form of a question, assuming correctly that I do so for marketing reasons. Questions are a pretty common arrow in the copywriter’s quiver. Properly constructed, they are inherently interesting and instantly involving. I’m not as good at this as I plan to be, but one of things I’m looking for in a good question is something that incites at least as much curiosity as it satisfies. I give you the headline of this post as an example.

But Teri’s off-hand remark — “You don’t do anything without a purpose” — means everything to me, because it’s a completely true statement about everything I do — and everything I’ve ever wanted to be. I can’t promise you that I always know what I’m doing, but I always know with perfect certainty what it is I intend to be doing — what objective I hope to achieve by my efforts.

So we’ve been playing this scenius game since Thanksgiving, really since Swallow Hill Road, and it’s fun to explore how much we understand of what we’re doing, and, fun, too, to understand how much there is that we’ve never thought to explore.

Both Cheryl Johnson and I have been rebuilding our “Current Listings” content as Scenius scenes. Why? Because a content management system like a weblog is the perfect way of organizing frequently-edited copy — provide that you have some way of delivering the content in a form you can stand, once you’ve edited it. This is what Scenius — the software praxis, not the social process — is all about.

Stop.

A scenius — lower case — is a metaphor for a kind of communal genius. The word comes from “scene” plus “genius”, and the best example of a scenius that I can offer is the birth of Bebop jazz. When you put smart, well-informed, passionate people together, the synergy of their Read more

December 9, 2008

The Scenius.net scenes reader can tell if you’re working at your desktop web browser or on your iPhone…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

…and switch Cascading Style Sheets intelligently. What it needs are more shared scenes.

Making a shared Scenius scene is work. Not a lot, but some. What do you get in return:

  • Added-value content for your blog and for any blog that echoes your scene
  • A quick way to promote news or ideas you think are important without writing full blog posts
  • By your links, you draw attention to your blog from other blogs in your content sphere
  • Your scene links back to your blog, so the more it echoes, the better for your SEO posture
  • When other blogs echo your shared scene, they are exposing your blog to their readers, which can lead to new readers — or new business

Your weblog put you into the narrowcasting business, and that’s a great thing. Building a shared Scenius scene will put you into the broadcasting business, a boon that gains in benefits — for everyone — the more it echoes.

What’s in it for me? With each scene, I’m taking a link back to BloodhoundBlog — a non-monetized weblog. In other words, I’m working for free, which is not at all unusual. You live in a world infested with sleazoid vendors, each one of whom wants to nick you for monthly fees for work you can easily do yourself. I will show you — for free — how to build yourself a broadcast platform that will benefit everyone involved, yourself the most.

There are a few people working (behind the scenes as it were) on shared Scenes that will debut in the next few days. This is a bandwagon worth jumping on. Good for your readers. Good for the writers you feature. Good for the blogs echoing your shared scenes — and good for their readers. And good for you.

Review the terms and conditions and let me know when you’re ready to get started on your own shared Scenius scene.

December 7, 2008

Death, Taxes and Real Estate 3.0

by

Realtor, Rabble-Rouser

Author website

What do death, taxes and real estate all have in common?

Technology.

I’ve blogged on several occasions about Real Estate Web 2.0 and my belief that in the myriad of solutions that have been developed, deployed and adopted, there has yet to be a “real estate agent killer” app.

Not long ago, innovators wanted to develop technology solutions that unleashed the knowledge within the MLS – that is where the perceived value of the real estate transaction was hidden.  Enhanced property search and data analytics was the way to break the current commission based business model, drive down the cost of the transaction and essentially eliminate the middleman – the agent and/or broker.

I was often confused when I read comparisons between the real estate industry and the travel industry.  Again, technology innovators wanted to do to the real estate business what Expedia, Orbitz or Hotwire have done to the travel industry – put the consumer in the driver’s seat and eliminate the middleman – the travel agent.

Not to belittle the travel agent, but clearly much has been learned about the real estate transaction process to determine that real estate is not like the travel industry.  Unlocking the MLS and aggregating data alone does not address the complexity of the real estate transaction, nor does enhanced search engines that exploit mapping technologies.

Real estate is a knowledge-based business.  In creating true innovation, my question is why aren’t technology innovators drawing parallels to other professions that are knowledge-based?    I can’t help to think that there can be a significant disconnect between our current business model, i.e our compensation, and the knowledge and expertise that experienced agents have developed over time.

To better understand the disconnect is to understand how the Pareto principle applies to a real estate transaction.  Could a knowledge management solution address 80% of the process-related issues to buying and selling real estate, leaving the 20% of the really tough, unexpected issues and problems to be addressed and managed by a licensed real estate professional?

I have my business degree in accounting – I never practiced accounting, however, when it comes to tax time, I feel obligated Read more

December 6, 2008

Making the Scenius scene: I’m prepared to share an entirely new style of blogging with you — but you have to hold up your end

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I wrote last week about the Scenius blogs we’ve been playing with. The concepts we’ve developed constitute a new style of blogging, a hybrid of the best features of link-blogging and RSS feeds with much better control and with none of the defects.

A Scenius blog called “Switched-On Marketing” is riding in our sidebar, along with some other real estate blogs. I have another one called “Phoenix Area Headlines” running on our client-focused real estate weblogs.

That last sentence is important: I maintain one Scenius blog for “Phoenix Area Headlines”, but I can echo it wherever I want it to appear. And it comes in like a blog, not like a feed or a widget, with full control over the appearance and with all the links behaving as expected.

Why is that important? Because I now have a reliable source of keyword-rich dynamic content that I can share with other Phoenix-area weblogs. Other Phoenix real estate webloggers are free to use it, but I’m much more interested in hanging around the sidebars of weblogs run by my clients or future clients.

The “Phoenix Area Headlines” Scenius blog is composed of content that will be interesting to readers of any weblog in the Phoenix area. It’s a regularly-updated supply of new content for any weblog that hosts it.

The “Phoenix Area Headlines” Scenius blog is rich in keywords that will cause the blogs that host it to score well with search engines. I’m giving my neighbors content and also boosting their SEO.

The “Phoenix Area Headlines” Scenius blog consists of highly dynamic content. There are new posts every day, and old posts scroll off the bottom every day. What this means is that search engines will see new unique content on every page they spider, every time they spider, if those pages are echoing my Scenius blog.

And the “Phoenix Area Headlines” Scenius blog links back to BloodhoundRealty.com. I’m using sweat equity to buy a place on your sidebar. Your readers win, you win, I win — everybody wins.

The “Switched-On Marketing” Scenius blog does the same sorts of jobs for real estate and marketing weblogs: I give you interesting Read more

December 5, 2008

Speaking in tongues: Revising my universal contact form for real estate weblogs — e-paging support and friendlier coding

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

About eleven months ago, I built a universal contact form for real estate webloggers. Just lately, I’ve revisited that code to add support for e-paging and other kinds of hyper-brief email-based messaging. Getting a form emailed to the office is a nice thing — unless you’re out previewing or inspecting all day. The new version will find you wherever you are.

The revised contact form will email you your prospect’s contact information (to as many email addresses as you like) and, also, optionally e-page you with a very brief form of the information (again transmitting to as many e-page addresses as you choose).

The e-page will give you the party’s name, email address and phone number (the latter two are clickable if your phone supports this function), along with as much of the message as will transmit. The form imposes brevity, so you should be able to puzzle out what is wanted. Everything in the e-page is sent in the briefest practical form to maximize the amount of space left for the message.

Nothing has changed in the form of the user interface — and the UI should inherit its appearance from your CSS specification. But I’ve changed the way the software works internally and the way it installs, both to make it easier to deploy and to avoid conflicts with your ISP’s tech support team.

This contact form is built for WordPress.org weblogs only. It might work in other blogging platforms — and it will certainly work in any static PHP page — but that’s not what we’re talking about right now. You can install the contact form in your sidebar, provided you know how to edit the theme file called sidebar.php. If you have a PHP plug-in installed in your weblog, you can install the form on a WordPress Page, perhaps adding a “Contact Me” button on your sidebar.

Nota bene: There can only be one “Submit” button per page in HTML, so, if you install the contact form on your sidebar, your search button is no longer going to work. If you have to kick something off the sidebar and onto a WordPress Read more

December 4, 2008

Unlocking the scenius of BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix, a hands-on, step-by-step, learn-by-doing guerrilla marketing boot camp

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This came in by email, but I’m answering it publicly because I expect the question is fairly common:

I am a member of the Cyberprofessionals group. I was unable to attend the session in Orlando and therefore missed your presentation. I have read the materials about the upcoming event in Phoenix and I’m not entirely sure what it’s all about. From what I can see it’s going to be about blogging, and that’s great, but I have perhaps a more broad interest in social networking as well. I know some of the people involved may be experts in that. Could you give me some idea as to the time that is going to be devoted to each of the subject matters.

For a start, let me say that everything I’m saying right now is subject to change. We have some of this ironed out in detail, but much is still to be determined. Moreover, we’re pretty flexible in the way we think. The world we live in upends itself entirely every 15 months or so, and we’re always prepared to turn on a dime. Even so, BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix is going to break out something like this:

First, as I’ve said, the event is going to be a hands-on, step-by-step, learn-by-doing guerrilla marketing boot camp. Our students will be with us for 72 hours total, and out of that time, we could end up working 54 or more hours. We are going to take on every aspect of your marketing praxis, and we’re going to rebuild as much of it as we can in our time together. If you do the prep work your instructors are going to recommend, and if you come to Phoenix prepared to work, you’ll fly home exhausted but with a completely overhauled marketing profile — online, in the social graph, in print and face-to-face.

That’s ambitious, but we can pull it off because we intend to work like no other marketing conference you’ve ever been to or heard about. You are literally going to do the actual work you are learning about — as you learn about it. It Read more

December 3, 2008

BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix will be a hands-on overhaul of your online and offline marketing – enroll now to be sure you get a seat

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We’ve got the dates for BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix: April 28th to May 1st, 2009.

We’ve got the location: The Radisson Phoenix Airport Hotel North, 427 North 44th St, Phoenix, AZ 85008.

And we’ve got the game plan: A three-day Guerilla Marketing Boot Camp during which you’re going to completely revise your marketing profile — in class. We’re not going to tell you how we work. We’re not going to show you how we work. We’re going to work with you, hands-on, step-by-step as we overhaul your marketing strategy from the ground up.

What are we missing? You. Skip ahead if you’re ready to register for the most intense real estate marketing conference you will ever attend.

Got questions? Here are some BloodhoundBlog posts discussing Unchained in Orlando and anticipating the scenius to come in Phoenix:

Want to know even more? Why not. We’re in the marketing business, after all.

Who should come to BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix? If it’s part of your job to attract and convert new business, we have what you need. On BloodhoundBlog, we talk a lot about Social Media Marketing, but in our own businesses, we work with Social Media Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing, Direct Marketing and good old-fashioned belly-to-belly sales. We also work directly with internet-based tools from PHP to RSS to CSS — acronym soup.

Why should you come? We’ll be going through every bit of this at BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix. Not lecturing as you race to keep up in your notes, but actually doing the work, hands-on, on your own marketing materials.

How will you benefit? Not only will you completely overhaul your existing marketing profile, you’ll learn how Read more

December 2, 2008

Not All Dinosaurs Are Extinct

by

Realtor, Rabble-Rouser

Author website

I know an agent with big hair – she used to drive a Cadillac – she traded it in for a Lexus.

She likes to lunch – alot – with friends, clients and colleagues.  She started selling real estate when I started high school – basically ALONG time ago.

She’s not on Facebook.  She twitters only in the office – face to face – with friends, clients and colleagues.  She’s not on MySpace – Her space is the desk in the office – overwhelmed with a prodigous Rolodex with cards falling out.  She emails, but her assistant does the typing.  Funny thing is – she seems to always be on the phone.  Talking.  Offering well-wishes on birthdays, engagements, job promotions, new children arrivals and even new grandchildren arrivals.

I think she may be working on the third generation of her first clients.

I’ve never heard her ask for business – often times the phone calls are incoming, not outgoing.  She’s busy, but not overwhelmed.  During a casual conversation regarding a recent property showing, she shared some very valuable insight regarding the unit – you see, she’s sold it twice before.

When she tells me she knows everyone in the business, I believe her.

She’s social – but not of the media type.

In comparison, I believe I am more social, but perhaps too much of the media type.  I like technology.  I believe that technology can and will transform how real estate is transacted.  Through observation, however, I have learned that even in the absence of technology, real estate is transacted – quite successfully.

November 30, 2008

“Privacy is an artifact of inefficiency”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I say that just about every time I speak in public, and people always ask me to repeat it, and they inscribe it carefully into their notes.

It’s a simple enough idea: What you’ve thought of all your life as privacy has simply been a function of inefficient data processing tools. The more efficacious the means of acquiring and storing data become, the less privacy — unintentional ignorance by others of observable facts — you will have.

If you find this idea repellent — dang…

It is what it is, and it’s absurd to rebel against it. We are real, physical entities. Our purposive actions sometimes have secondary physical consequences that are potentially observable to other people — and to data acquisition devices. Your best hope of achieving privacy, going forward, is to expire. Short of that, you might try to exist in some sort of extra-physical way. And short of that, you might try doing everything you do where no one — and nothing — else can observe you. And short of all that, swallow hard and prepare to have every fact of your life known, at least potentially, by anyone or everyone else.

This does not bother me at all. I deliberately lead a hugely public life. I’m not showy, I hope, but I never want for someone to be able to say something truthful about me that I have not said first myself. I try to lead a very moral life, but no one is perfect. But what I don’t want, ever, is to give the impression that I am trying to hide my imperfections. (Disclosure: I caused a car accident earlier this evening. No one was hurt, but the front end of my car was smacked up pretty good.)

(People who send me email will have grown used to me replying with multiple names in the CC line. I’m never trying to hide facts about my life, but, I am normally trying very hard to not-hide those facts.)

Another thing I say in speeches is that the world is becoming more and more the realm I would have imagined for myself. Mostly the Read more

November 29, 2008

Who wants to play the Scenius game? Rebuilding The Long List as a micro-blog

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

All right, let’s play a little, shall we?

One of the things that came out of our little scenius on Thanksgiving (which continues through today) was a better way of handling the job I used to do with The Long List of Odysseus Medal nominees. I’ve been ignoring that chore since last Spring, a plausible clue that I just might end up ignoring it forevermore. Even so, it was a good idea, and I learned a lot of cool stuff from the code I wrote to manage The Long List scroller that used to live in our sidebar.

What I want to do for now is to implement another kind of sidebar scroller, this one more like a micro-blog of useful and informative posts — mostly marketing, but other matters of importance as well. There were people who used The Long List as their feed reader, and this should work even better in that regard.

You can see it in our sidebar right now. It’s the scroller box headed “SCENIUS: SWITCHED-ON MARKETING” — with links to 50 highly-relevant weblog posts.

If you want to play along with the development process, you can be a big help.

How?

Break this software:

<!-- BEGIN Scenius -->
<p><div style="display:block; width:95%;
height:320px; overflow:auto; padding-left:6px;
padding-right:6px; padding-top:3px;
border:1px solid #a9a9a9; ">
<?PHP $ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 
"http://scenius.bloodhoundblog.net/");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_exec($ch); curl_close($ch); ?></div></p>
<!-- END Scenius -->

I’m serious. I want you to install that code in your sidebar and see if you can break it.

There are two ways we know of that you might be able to break it.

First, the PHP may not want to work for you. If that happens, I would love to see a screen shot in your email to me about what happened. So you know: I do not believe this will happen. We broke it every which way yesterday, and I think I have code that should work on any true Apache web server.

The second way that this code could fail is that it might not look right. It should come into your sidebar as a well-behaved citizen. It should inherit your sidebar’s style sheets, and it should scroll top to bottom but not left to Read more

November 27, 2008

The Thanksgiving Day scenius at BloodhoundBlog

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Teri Lussier and Eric Blackwell get up early in a time zone two hours earlier than mine. Cheryl Johnson lives an hour later than me, but I don’t think she ever sleeps. Anyway, this morning I woke up to Teri, Eric and Cheryl gnawing on a bunch of insanely great ideas by email.

That’s a scenius, y’all: Smart, focused people concentrating on well-understood problems, looking for innovative solutions.

I chipped in a little here and a little there, and then, just like that, we landed on a brand new way of thinking about community building with hyper-local weblogs.

My piece of the puzzle was new software, but what we’re doing is not a tool but a praxis, a working procedure. As a consequence, I’m not going to teach this until BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix. I’ll show you how to use your weblog to make better connections with other local — non-real estate — blogs, even as you both improve your SEO and maximize the SEO benefits of weblogging. This is killer stuff, literally the hammer-tap in just the right spot, a cornucopia of benefits for a minimal effort.

But: It involves theory, preparation and a certain amount of software hacking, so we’re going to do it when we can do it all together, side-by-side and step-by-step in Phoenix.

I know money is tight. Pinch your pennies and bring them to Phoenix. We’re going to make it worth your while…

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November 26, 2008

As an expression of gratitude to the Bloodhounds, here’s an Unchained Melody for Thanksgiving

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Thanksgiving was a holiday established by productive people to celebrate the success of their work. –Ayn Rand

I love this place — this life, this earth and this tiny little corner of the net. The accretion of evidence leads me to believe that the world is becoming more and more the realm I would have designed for myself. Yes, we’re headed into serious economic trouble, and, yes, we’re headed that way under the leadership of a man who has never held a job in his life and who makes no secret that he knows nothing about the causes of wealth and poverty.

But: Even so: So what?

We are on the cusp of riches without limits. We are literally standing around getting soaked to the skin as soup rains down from the skies, and yet we are so much in the thrall of our treasured wounds that we can’t even see it. That much, at least, is a correctable nuisance.

The curtain goes up at eleven tonight on Act Three of my life, and I know better than anyone that I am the best beneficiary of the riches I talk about. All my life people have asked me for writing advice, and, without intending to be glib, I told them simply this: Have something to say, and have a way of saying it. I am befriended by the times, and — amazingly to me — I am by now able to ship these piles of ore I have quarried from my mind. Do you want to know how to change the world forever, for the good? You do it one mind at a time — starting with your own.

I’m grateful to the Bloodhounds — to the people who read, comment and write here — both for BloodhoundBlog and for Unchained. I’m thankful for our clients, who have been prosperous enough to keep us in business. I don’t think I ever adequately express my gratitude to Cathleen, who gives me everything that can be had from another person. There are so many others — Richard Riccelli and Brian Brady and Teri Lussier — so I hope Read more

November 26, 2008

Social bookmarking for home search. Will it work?

by

Realtor, Urban Jedi

Author website

This has been in draft mode for a few days now since I commented on this at Mashable. That’s just as well since Benn over at AG was able to get a look under the hood which changes my feelings about this new bookmarking app for home lookers. (now in beta testing)

I’ve been a big fan of using Delicious for my own personal research for a while now. It offers a simple way to tag, take notes, and store in the cloud what it is I need to understand about something I’m curious about so that down the road I can either share that information with others or keep it private to myself.

Dwellicious puts forth the effort to do this for home search. As some of you may remember, this has been tried before with little success (if at all) for some reason. My take at first blush is that it’s something that users will be hard pressed to adopt. I have worked with several tech savvy clients who have done their own home search with the tools to share information and what I have found is that they are very reluctant to share anything about their decision making process. People hold their cards close to their chest when purchasing homes and often don’t even know what it is they want until they see it. So, for note taking purposes, I don’t know that it will be much help, but it’s nice to have the option.

It’s too bad you don’t see a consumer based search site that has all of the inventory data with a few solid consumer centric options like saving, RSS updates, and sharing without all the advertising, hierarchy of ‘featured listings’ and sponsorship options getting in your way. Bookmarking while weeding through various sites seems to be a chore few will have the know how or patience to handle. Another problem might be the slowness of updating on these sites to make any timely use of RSS. It could be a rewarding experience for those to Read more

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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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