BloodhoundBlog

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Category: Technology (page 21 of 60)

November 25, 2008

What’s Mu? Pulling unforeseen results out of BloodhoundBlog.net

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We launched BloodhoundBlog.net just a week and a day ago, and already WordPress-MultiUser is changing my approach to everything in the weblogging world.

First, just as a caveat: It’s a bear to set up. Because of BloodhoundBlog, we have an enormous amount of server horsepower, but I think it matters a great deal that we live on a dedicated server. We can customize the host to live the way we need it to live, and we command a lot of tech support attention from Hostgator.com — which has been invaluable.

But as with the discussion of FeedWordPress, living in the Mu universe leads to different ways of thinking.

An example: We’re wrestling with domain mapping right now, but, once we get it working, we will be able to put our affiliated vendors into their own blogs, running under their own domain names, in two wags of a BloodPuppy’s tail. If you think about the agony of setting up unique WordPress.org blogs, the upfront effort of getting WP-Mu to run will be handsomely repaid.

Likewise, both WordPress (dot org) and WP-Mu were upgraded to version 2.6.5 tonight. I already upgraded the BloodhoundBlog.net weblogs. And sometime between now and Sunday, I will get to upgrade a solid dozen WP.org blogs. Between now and the new year, most or all of those will be moving to a new WP-Mu installation.

Here’s the best bet: The ability to set up clone weblogs on demand will permit a very granular kind of hyper-local weblogging. This suggests to me one or two more WP-Mu installations, strictly for real estate purposes.

And here’s a great big what’s more: Give me another week with this software and let’s see what else I can come up with…

November 24, 2008

Something new under the sun: Sim and the future of human interaction

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I saw this commercial over the weekend and it’s been making me nuts:

This is fascinating to me. This is Game Console 2.0, the participatory gaming experience. Okay, that much is not new, going back to the Dreamscape, anyway. Ubiquitous at broadband speeds since the original Xbox.

What’s cool here is that the interaction is, first, among adults, and, second, has nothing to do with the game play. This is remote schmoozing through a game console, a phone call conducted from within a sim. SecondLifeLite, as it were.

I’m wondering if Nintendo got viraled on this, if a cadre of moms figured out how to use the software this way during naptime, and Nintendo is marketing to grow a niche that erupted spontaneously.

There’s way more. Simulation is emerging as a fourth branch of science. Computing grows year by year in its accretion of power. A model is not reality, a map is not the territory, but a sim of, for example, the life cycle of a star, could teach us as much in ten minutes as we have managed to learn in the last 10,000 years.

Now combine the two. Take ordinary people with better and better user-interface devices and let them work and play together by simulation in the cloud. The two phenomena are not the same, but, even so, at this incredibly cheap end-user level, we are all avidly nurturing and cultivating precisely the intellectual capital we will need going forward.

It’s daunting to stand at the threshold of what may be a calamitous economic disaster and, yet, to recognize that we are also at the threshold of an unimaginable increase in human mental prowess.

 
Further notice: Apparently, Nintendo has pursued an Alpha Moms astroturfing strategy for the Wii since its introduction. I don’t know if this use of this software is something they have encouraged, but presumably it is. Doesn’t matter to me. Better questions: Are moms meeting through this game? Are they strangers until they discover each other in the game — much as we discover one another through weblogs? More interesting: Are the children for whom this game is actually designed meeting Read more

November 24, 2008

My BloodhoundBlog wish list as we embark on the SplendorQuest

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We’re going to fire up SplendorQuest.com full-bore this week. For now it’s nothing, no need to link to it. But if you’ve ever done a whois on any one of our domains, you will have seen that SplendorQuest.com lives at the top of everything.

I’ve talked about Splendor a lot at BloodhoundBlog. It’s the defining metaphor of my life. I wrote my best philosophical defense of the idea, so far, in January and February of 1988, and my best ostensive definition in 1997. I’ve promised myself for two solid decades that I would get back to this idea, thinking that it was something that I would attend to in full in my retirement. Lately, that seems to me to be a less than satisfactory resolution. For one thing, this is the perfect time to talk about Splendor, just as we are about to suffer the full consequences of a hundred centuries of the worship of Squalor. And for another, I have just lately come to the realization that I will never, ever retire.

I predict that SplendorQuest.com, whatever else it might become, will be a place of manifestoes. Even so, I think I’ve already written my own SplendorQuest manifesto. There’s a lot that I’m saying in that little extract, and you could read it every day and always find something new in it. But the essence of the thing, for me, is this: “[P]art of being who I am is a conscious refusal to hide things like this just because many people don’t want to hear them. I don’t believe that I owe anything to other people, but the best gift I can offer my fellow men is not to hide who I am.” I love my life, but, much more importantly, I refuse to affect to hold my life in contempt. That’s not Splendor, not by itself, but that’s a gift I can share with my brothermen just by being alive.

What we have planned — what I have planned, at least — is simply to be alive in public as this thing that I want to become. Just to be shamelessly alive, Read more

November 23, 2008

Speaking in tongues: Using the power of a robust text editor to code HTML pages with dispatch

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Linked below is a short screencast on how I use the text editor known as TextWrangler to wrangle text into usable formats. This particular episode illustrates how I create coded HTML from my weekly Arizona Republic column. In future screencasts, I’ll want to illustrate more arcane ideas about deploying robust software toward highly productive objectives.

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November 20, 2008

Get friendz and generate adulation by using the App that expresses so you don’t have to. “Ideal for the imaginatively challenged”

by

Realtor, Urban Jedi

Author website

My brow is furrowed again and I should get this out before my wife gets home to hear yet, another one of my Andy Rooney-ish tirades on ‘how my day was’

So help me out here.  How is this application helpful?  In being social in any environment we are more or less on the same page.  Most people feel insecure about something if not many things.   It takes effort to expand beyond your own self-consciousness sometimes to get a thought out past your own nose.   So why, when we are shielded with the plastic from our computers, and most likely miles between us, would you feel the need to be more excepted for what you express?

Taking a look at the ‘what’s it for‘ page, let’s run it down:

  • “How many hours have you wasted trying to think of something suitably witty, funny and original for your status on Facebook or Twitter?”

Not nearly as many I’m sure as days that are wasted mindlessly sitting in front of the TV.  Thinking is genuinely regarded as a natural and healthy thing to do and not something to be discouraged.  That is, unless you are watching TV 😉

  • “Let’s face it, a status like “Dave is mowing the lawn” or “Kate is asleep” is not going to impress that huge entourage of friends you’ve amassed.”

Gee, you mean now that I have amassed my very own entourage I should just spend my time with cut-n-paste churned updates from the bot.  I got one even better.  Why not just hire myself a social media assistant to churn babble for me.  I’ve got better things to do like take Italian lessons using Rosetta Stone to build an entourage of Real Estate/Vespa enthusiasts in on Meemi.com.   My take is that it’s opt in on social networks anyway.  I understand everyone’s complaints about the banality of updates like Sbux is out of half and half or I’m walking my dog, but what if it does mean something in the context of how you are relating to others in the moment.  I love to hear my family and friends are up through Read more

November 20, 2008

Rethinking Real Estate Web 2.0

by

Realtor, Rabble-Rouser

Author website

What do consumers want? I believe this question has been asked ten times to Sunday as it relates to real estate.

I recently read Marc Davison’s recent blog post at 1000Watt Blog summarizing the results of that exact question, What do Consumers Want?.  The report, commissioned by Keller Williams, was developed and written by an impressive list of MBAs and PhDs.  With that amount of intellectual firepower, it is often difficult to question its credibility.

In addition to the report commissioned by Keller Williams, MBA and PhD’s et al, I read a synopsis of NAR’s buyer and seller’s survey, essentially providing the statistics behind today’s buyers and sellers as well as their needs.   I honed in a three key points in NAR’s report:

1.  “Home buyers are consistent in their expectations of real estate agents. Buyers thought the most important agent services are helping find the right house, and negotiating sales terms and price. Because agents often are chosen based on a referral, or were used in a previous transaction, two-thirds of buyers contacted only one real estate agent in the search process.”

2.  “Primarily, sellers want agents to price their home competitively, market the property, find a buyer and sell within a specific timeframe.”

3.  “The most difficult tasks reported by unrepresented sellers are selling within the planned length of time, getting the right price, preparing the home for sale, and understanding and performing paperwork.”

What I found interesting about the Keller William’s report was its premise –  How do you go about the process of selecting an agent?  What I found interesting about the NAR report was that the premise was more consumer centric, not agent centric.

The question I pose is how many of the current RE Web 2.0 solutions have truly “blue sky” functionality?  What if the premise assumed that there was no real estate agent?   What if a solution existed that allowed the consumer to buy and sell real estate at will without the use of a professional?

Ok – now don’t excommunicate me.  I think from a technology perspective, I believe it is a very valid question.  All too often, solutions are Read more

November 20, 2008

Estately.com grows by more than 50%, adding Chicagoland and Long Island, NY, to it on-line inventory of homes for sale

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Seattle-based web search start-up Estately.com adds 120,000 new listings to it inventory today, expanding from the west coast to Chicago and Long Island. The upgrade brings Estately’s inventory to over 300,000 MLS-listed homes. Also a part of today’s announcement, the search-bot will show extended listing histories on homes, a move also recently taken by Redfn.com.

You can play with the Chicago listings by clicking this link. I have a link for the Long Island listings, but I’m not sure it’s working right.

As a matter of disclosure: Estately.com founder Galen Ward writes for BloodhoundBlog.

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November 17, 2008

Introducing BloodhoundBlog.net, free WordPress weblogs for real estate professionals

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Say hello to BloodhoundBlog.net, free WordPress Multi-user weblogs for real estate professionals.

We talked about doing this in Orlando, at the scenius on Swallow Hill Road. Where we started was with the idea of WordPress blogs for the CyberProfessionals to practice on.

We saw that the right system could serve the same function for any novice bloggers — including all of the folks on Active Rain looking to make the leap to WordPress weblogging.

And BloodhoundBlog.net can also be a space for BloodhoundBlog Unchained instructors to help their students get their homework together before coming to Phoenix.

Will this be your last word in real estate weblogging? It can be, but that strikes me as a poor idea. What we’re offering is a free weblogging platform where real estate professionals can learn and grow, ultimately to go off and set up their own WordPress.org weblogs.

And you had better know this is an Unchained weblogging world: You can import content from a host of blogging platforms, and everything you do on BloodhoundBlog.net is easily exported when you’re ready to move on.

If you want to go ahead and get started, just go to BloodhoundBlog.net and set up a new blog. It’s fast, easy and fun.

Still here? Who should set up a BloodhoundBlog.net weblog?

  • Stone newbies. If you want to learn to weblog, you might as well start with the best software, among people who can help you develop the best possible practices.
  • Intermediate bloggers. If you’ve been toying with Active Rain or with real estate forums, it might be time to put away childish things. The work you do with us will transfer easily to a full-blown WordPress.org weblog.
  • Kindred spirits. If you want to build a community of like minds, the price of doing so here can’t be beat.
  • Adhocracy activists. A weblog is the perfect means of coordinating, for example, the Wine-Tasting Realtors of Biloxi.
  • Teachers of lessons profound and arcane — starting with the slave-drivers of BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix.

How can we do this? We have the horsepower — dawgpower — that’s how. Even so, we’re not letting you all the way off the leash. There are plug-ins, but Read more

November 17, 2008

The Difference Between the Best Website and Results

by

Realtor, Internet Entrepreneur

Author website

The Web Marketing Association has an annual competition in 96 industries to recognize what they believe are the best websites. In the real estate section, they list 7 criteria they look for:

  1. Design
  2. Ease of use
  3. Copywriting
  4. Interactivity
  5. Use of technology
  6. Innovation
  7. Content

All seven are subjective, which is fine: the organization giving the award gets to set the criteria. But looking at the winner last year, their award is doing a great disservice to any real estate agent who uses that site as their inspiration. Here is a link to the site.

Now I don’t know the people who built the site, and I don’t know those agents or their company. Nor do I have anything against them, or the award.

Personally, I think the site is fine but not spectacular in execution for what it is: a nice-looking website.

But there’s not one mention in seven criteria of results.  My assumption is that most businesses want a website that is going to help them get results (i.e. generate visitors and turn them into leads). And here’s why this site is at a severe disadvantage.

It is invisible to search engines.

To you, me, and anyone else with a Flash plugin, this is what the site looks like to human eyes:

What does this site look like to Google? Here’s a visual of the actual page using a text-based browser:

It looks like nothing. Want proof?

One entry.  Name.  Rank.  Serial Number.

A site exists.  Beyond that?  No information.

This site leaves money on the table. For my real estate site, according to Google Analytics, 73.4% of my 150-250 visitors per day come from search engines.

But the only way to find their site from Google is by its own name, “Elizabeth Lofts”, and if one goal of marketing is to get people who don’t already know your name to contact you, then this site had failed by that criteria.

And as of today, you won’t find it under “Pearl District” or “Pearl District Condominiums” (until the purgatory of page 5) so it wouldn’t have generated leads from people who express interest in that district.

Worse, this site has plenty of information Read more

November 16, 2008

Can California cultivate anything better than the seeds of its own destruction? Urbanologist Joel Kotkin tallies the state’s ills

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Joel Kotkin on the rise and fall of the Golden State:

Twenty-five years ago, along with another young journalist, I coauthored a book called California, Inc. about our adopted home state. The book described “California’s rise to economic, political, and cultural ascendancy.”

As relative newcomers at the time, we saw California as a place of limitless possibility. And over most of the next two decades, my coauthor, Paul Grabowicz, and I could feel comfortable that we were indeed predicting the future.

But much has changed in recent years. And today our Golden State appears headed, if not for imminent disaster, then toward an unanticipated, maddening, and largely unnecessary mediocrity.

Since 2000, California’s job growth rate— which in the late 1970s surged at many times the national average—has lagged behind the national average by almost 20 percent. Rapid population growth, once synonymous with the state, has slowed dramatically. Most troubling of all, domestic out-migration, about even in 2001, swelled to over 260,000 in 2007 and now surpasses international immigration. Texas has replaced California as the leading growth center for Hispanics.

Out-migration is a key factor, along with a weak economy, for the collapse of the housing market. Simply put, the population growth expected for many areas has not materialized, nor the new jobs that might attract newcomers. In the past year, four of the top six housing markets in terms of price decline have been in California, including Sacramento, San Diego, Riverside, and Los Angeles. The Central Valley towns of Stockton, Merced, and Modesto have all been awarded the dubious honors of the highest foreclosure rates in the nation during the past year.

Even with prices down, many of the most desirable places in California are also among the most unaffordable in the nation. Less than 15 percent of households earning the local median income can afford a home in L.A. or San Francisco. In Santa Barbara, San Diego, Oxnard, Santa Cruz, or San Jose, it’s less than a third. That’s about half the number who can buy in the big Texas or North Carolina markets. Moreover, state officials warned in October that they might have to seek Read more

November 13, 2008

Passion play: A working plan for working our brains until they explode at BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I like Teri’s idea of an exploding brain. Or maybe we can think of the brain as a kernal of popcorn — hard and seemingly inflexible until just the right application of heat makes it explode into something eight times its original size. In addition to all the other things people might call me, I am most adamantly an evangelist for expanding minds, so here is the rough game plan I worked out for BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix on the flight home from Orlando:


Click on the image to open a PDF version.
(Updated to reflect the actual dates of the event.)

Here’s the way this is going to work: If you come to Unchained, we want you staying at our hotel — even if you live in Phoenix. Why? Because the scenius we plan to build is going to look an awful lot like a boot camp. If you’re with us from 5 pm on Thursday to 5 pm on Sunday, you could end up working as much as 54 of those 72 hours. Some people need more sleep than others, but the harder you work at the work we plan to set before you, the greater the benefits you will reap.

What benefits?

Recall that you’re going to be completely overhauling your marketing profile. Each one of those eight labs will be hands-on, step-by-step explorations of the course matter. You won’t be working on examples or dummy versions, you’ll be working on your own marketing materials, making them better and more effective in collaboration with your instructors and team-mates.

Moreover, you’ll be building scenius scenes at all levels of interaction. The whole conference will be a giant scenius, a chance for you to learn and to teach with some of the hardest-charging minds in modern real estate marketing. Your labs will form smaller scenes, and the work you do in ad hoc teams will be the smallest of scenius scenes — as small as two people working together by the hotel pool. This kind of intense interaction, if you dare to immerse yourself in it, will leave you drenched in new knowledge, new skills — Read more

November 11, 2008

Podcast: Sherry Chris delivers the keynote address to BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Orlando, November 7th, 2008

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We had the honor of hosting Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate CEO Sherry Chris as the keynote speaker for BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Orlando. I can’t promise we’ll do this indefinitely, but this is twice now that we’ve featured executives in do-or-die situations — and who can deny that this makes for interesting speeches?

Here’s a short FlipCam clip I made of Chris while she was speaking:

Linked below is an MP3 podcast file of her complete address.

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November 10, 2008

Thinking out loud about BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Here’s where we start, and we knew this last May in Phoenix, but we hadn’t yet figured out how to pull it off:

BloodhoundBlog Unchained is not a conference or a seminar, it’s a workshop, a lab. We don’t want to talk about or teach or lecture about our style of marketing strategies, we want to deploy them. We want for the people who entrust us with their time and their minds and their money to come away having implemented their own unique versions of our tools, tricks, tips, tactics and techniques.

So that’s the beginning: Unchained in Phoenix will be a hands-on overhaul of your online and offline marketing.

This is a Unique Selling Proposition — totally unlike all of the redundant twitwit echo-chamber festivals — but don’t get too excited yet.

Why? Because overhauling anything is a big job. What we’re planning will take a lot of time, a lot of hard work, a lot of skull sweat and possibly repeated conquests of your own self-imposed mental limitations. Translation: We plan to wear you out.

When we first started talking about this “boot camp” kind of approach, we thought about doing it in two tracks, one more advanced, one less so. In both cases, it makes sense to me to work toward the goal of a complete overhaul of your marketing profile. How do the journeymen gain access to the master-track material? Don’t worry. We have plans for that, too.

So now we look like this: BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix will be a hard-charging boot camp for journeymen and masters at modern real estate marketing. I worked out a class schedule yesterday, and I think we can cover — and I mean thoroughly cover — eight major topics over the course of three days.

We’re not set in stone on these, but here are some classes that make sense to us:

Search Engine Optimization
    Guerrilla SEO — Optimizing your blogsite
    Advanced SEO topics

Search Engine Marketing
    Maximizing organic SEO results
    PPC, Analytics and ROI

Social Media Marketing
    Establishing a ubiquitous presence
    Working in the salt mines to bring home the salted bacon

Living in a web-wise world
    Building, customizing and maintaining a web presence
    Practical PHP for non-geeks

Direct Read more

November 10, 2008

Links to the Unchained: How people attending BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Orlando saw the event

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We lucked into WiFi in Orlando. I was convinced until my shoes hit the dirt on Thursday that we weren’t going to have it. But because people could connect, they did, working on social media sites in real time. A number of people also took exhaustive notes on their laptops, and here are some posts people have put up documenting their Unchained experience:

Eric Blackwell weighs in with My Top 10 Take Homes from BHB Unchained Orlando.

Greg Staker provides a nice summary of each of the presentations with How can my attending BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Orlando help you buy or sell Florida real estate?

(I could be wrong, but I think Eric Blackwell may have had an influence on that headline. 😉 )

By far the most comprehensive note-taker was John Sabia, a frequent commenter on BloodhoundBlog. His contribution to he discussion is called Unchained in Orlando.

If you have written up your Unchained experience hit me with the link and I will amend this post.

 
Further notice: Brian Brady at Active Rain: NAR Orlando: All Work and No Play Makes Brian A…, Daniel Rothamel at The Real Estate Zebra: I am not the audience, and what I plan to do about it.

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November 9, 2008

The scenius on Swallow Hill Road: A brief gloss on BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Orlando, November 7th, 2008

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

When we put together BloodhoundBlog Unchained In Phoenix, last Spring, we were gifted with the magnificent beneficence of Zillow.com. In consequence, we spent money like a college freshman with a Visa card. We knew Unchained in Orlando was going to have to be a leaner affair — and after this fall’s market collapse, it got quite a bit leaner than we had expected.

We knew were were going to have five or six Bloodhounds presenting, so I resolved to rent a house to save us all money on hotel rooms. We got a five-bedroom seasonal rental, in a community I choose to call West Disney, for $621 — a smokin’ deal for what turned out to be 5 dawgs plus Teri Lussier’s husband, Jamie.


Brian Brady with Teri and Jamie Lussier.

Emphasis: My objective in renting the home was to save money. That’s all.

Unintended consequence: The scenius on Swallow Hill Road.

Say what?

I’ve talked about the idea of a scenius before. A scenius is a kind of communal genius. When deeply-passionate, passionately-informed people get together to share what they know, the synergy of their interaction can throw off vast quantities of new ideas. This is what happened with us at our house on Swallow Hill Road.

The Unchained event was a rockin’ success. It was better than Unchained in Phoenix had been — which surprised no one more than me and Brian Brady. It’s unfair to say we topped ourselves, though. It was the speakers who made Orlando a killer event.

Here’s an example, a brief clip from the keynote address by Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate CEO Sherry Chris:

Brian has other videos, so we’ll see if we can get those posted in the next couple of days.

Sherry was great, but all of the speakers were at the top of their game. I don’t want to take anything away from anyone by saying that Kelley Koehler and Mitch Ribak were off the charts excellent — rich presentations full of practical, ready-to-implement techniques. John Sabia took voluminous notes that I’ll be linking to tomorrow, so you’ll be able to reap the essence of the day’s presentations.

Plus which, 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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