Category: Weblogging 101 (page 7 of 7)

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Do you know what stinks? The world is acrawl with canned-spam, cookie-cutter, rinse-and-repeat weblogging advice — and people follow it slavishly instead of keeping their own counsel, living their own ideal, following their own star.

That is: If I read another weblog post on how to write weblog posts, I think I’ll scream. To absolve myself of charges of hypocrisy, in advance, this not a post about how to write posts, it’s a post about how to write.

Do you want to know how to write? Here’s the tiniest taste of a first lesson: Start in the middle.

Not: “This is my report on…”

Not: “Webster’s defines…”

Not: “How can I begin to tell you…?”

Start in the middle, the way you’d start a phone conversation with someone you knew would be calling.

Like this: “Do you know what stinks?”

Oh, yes, comforting rules abound, but they are the very same rules you rebel against in every other aspect of your life. You say, “I don’t want the cookie-cutter taupe-on-taupe one-size-fits-all same-damn-thing.” And yet you scour the web, looking for sage advice about how to produce weblog posts that will not challenge, will not inspire, will not aspire, will not invoke, convoke or provoke, will not do anything except testify to your perfect ability to master perfectly bad advice.

If you are not interested in what you’re writing, how could you expect anyone else to be interested?

If you are convinced (by your own conviction or by having imbibed from too many fonts of false wisdom) that you cannot hope to connect with other people except by resort to EZ-reading tricks — dumbing the entire universe down to the drooling imbecility of the dumbest conceivable specimen — why would you expect anyone to respect and reflect upon your brilliance?

Good grief!

If you are writing to manipulate, follow the rules. They work.

If you’re writing to sell a product, follow the rules. They work.

If you’re writing to hide, writing to dissemble, writing to occlude, writing to obfuscate, writing to pull the wool over as many eyes as you can capture — follow the rules. They work.

But: If you are writing to communicate — make Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Back in the dark days before the turn of the millennium, if you saw something I had written, down at the bottom there would be a little addendum: “Join my email update list.” If you did this, you would get a copy of every new essay or story I wrote at the time that I made it public. Not as convenient (or as annoying) as a Listserv, but you wouldn’t have to scrounge around on Usenet to find my deathless prose. Back then, a lot of people distributed content this way.

Dave Winer, the Tesla of weblogging, saw how stupid this was and invented a much more efficient alternative: RSS syndication. Instead of an email pushed from an email client, an email of updated content was pulled from a newsreader. Not only would I not have to undertake any special effort to send the email, you could receive it only if, as and when you wanted it. Genius!

What’s important about this is that, from the standpoint of my copyright to my original content, nothing has changed. Before I was pushing emails to individual readers. Now individual readers are pulling emails. But, simply because an RSS feed is easy to obtain, easy to repurpose, easy to resyndicate — this does not imply that I have waived any rights to my intellectual property.

People sometimes argue that RSS syndication creates a gray area in IP law. It doesn’t. In the United States, a transmissible work of the mind is presumed by default to be copyright protected. The presumption is rebuttable — for example by a waiver of copyright. But if you have not waived the rights to your work, you do not need to assert them by filing a copyright notice or by appending a copyright symbol to your work product. Your work is yours, and, except for fair uses for non-commercial purposes — e.g., a quote with a link in a weblog post — no one has the right to republish your content without your expressed permission.

So: Your fine young weblog gets splogged: Your feed is “scraped” and republished with a lot of creepy Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The folks at ActiveRain are putting together a contest. It’s Pygmalion for webloggers, wherein experienced real estate webloggers take eager young blogging caterpillars into their tutelage, and, Henry Higgins-like, bring forth beautiful blogging butterflies in a few months’ time. The winning pair of bloggers will split $5,000 amongst their favorite charities.

(I predict my favorite charity will turn out to have something to do with stray animals.)

In any case, I’m looking for a patsy, er pigeon, er victim, er volunteer — I’m looking for a volunteer to learn the art and science of real estate weblogging with me as your tutor, er mentor, er insufferable bastard.

To disclaim is to disclose: I am not the gentlest teacher in the world. But I know a lot about weblogging, and I can teach you as much as can be taught about this art, this praxis, this obsession.

If you are at or very near the stage of being a total wannablogger with a will to make the leap to something that can blow kisses at true greatness, you’re my ideal candidate. I love you best in Phoenix, but if you’re not here, you’re just not here.

If you want to learn to do real estate weblogging wisely and well, with style, with grace, with humor and panache — I’m your volunteer.

But: I really, really like to win. So: Write to me and tell me why I should pick you as my co-competitor…
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Technorati Tags: blogging, Inman, Inman Connect, RE Connect, real estate, real estate marketing

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’m thinking that I should take a much larger role in the growth of the RE.net. Many people are convinced that hundreds of agents and lenders will be starting real estate weblogs in the coming year. That may or may not be so, but it is a certainty that the sharks are circling in the water, looking for another pound of flesh. I don’t absolutely hate vendor involvement in the real estate blogging world, but I’d like to do what I can to make sure people are getting what they’re paying for — and not paying to have smoke blown up their… noses.

Moreover, I am very concerned that new entrants will miss the forest in a quest for leads. There is nothing wrong with forging business relationships through weblogs, but we will kill everything if the RE.net comes to be seen, in consumers’ eyes, as just another spamvertising channel. Weblogging is about the good, the true and the beautiful first, and only secondarily about commerce. If we screw this up, it won’t work — not for commerce and not for anything.

I’ve talked with Brian Brady about doing blogging seminars, and I’ve traded email with other RE.net luminaries on the subject. For the moment, I feel like this is overkill. Arranging an event is a logistical nightmare, and, even then, it’s tough to get enough people together to make a dent in the problem. Worse yet, somebody has to pay for a seminar, either the attendees or a sponsor.

But what’s really needed is already here: Weblogs, podcasts and video podcasts. For now, I’m going to start putting together a basic set of tools in weblog and podcast form. As these materials start to gel, we’ll go buy some video studio time and commit the more important ideas to video podcasts. Maybe in the long run, we’ll produce a DVD or CD, but my thinking, for now at least, is that the best medium for discussing the world wide web is the world wide web.

But wait. There’s more. I’m going to start a meme game that we can use to catalog the RE.net Read more