Fri 3 Nov 2006
This and That….
Posted by Marlow Harris under Popular Culture, Real Estate
I upgraded to Wordpress 2.0.5 for both this blog and for www.UnusualLife.com and made a few new changes and additions. There was a little trouble with the tags, but other than that, pretty seamless. I took a few hints from Dustin a few weeks ago when he wrote The Big List of RCG Plug-ins, and I added Filosofo Comments Preview and the Recent Comments plug-in. I like that it doesn’t show pingbacks originating from my own blog.
Been following the continued saga of Zillow and thought it was pretty funny that a consumer group filed a complaint against them, saying it was “intentionally misleading consumers and real estate professionals” and could be violating civil rights and consumer protection laws. I mean, it’s just a toy, right? And now, I’ve read in Red Herring about a minority rights organization that’s preparing to challenge them on the grounds that its home valuations are “inaccurate, misleading, and detrimental to minority homeowners, who are more likely be negatively affected by the inaccuracies.” Reminds me of Bonfire of the Vanities. I keep looking for Al Sharpton to weigh in on all this….
Speaking of Zillow, they put MyBlogLog on their site and now whenever I visit their blog, there’s my smiling face staring back at me. Maybe in the name of tranparency in real estate I should remove my high school photo and send in one a little more recent….
I’ve been cyber-chatting with Tyler Sookochoff about the launch of www.Livium.com, his new website that says it will be an “online real estate community that provides Real Estate Professionals with tools to better market their listings, their neighborhood and, in the process, themselves”. I like the way it sounds. And it uses the word “suck” a lot, as in “some real estate websites suck”, “some real estate agents suck” and “Livium, however, will not suck (we hope)”. Since I also hope to be suck-free, I’m eager to see what they’re all about and what they come up with. Sounds like an ActiveRain kind of thing….. not sure how any of them are going to make any dough. Maybe one has to suck somewhat to make money. Not sure. If you’d like to keep informed when Livium launches, you can sign up here.
While Move reported a net income for the third quarter of 2006 at $1.3 million, HouseValues released its third quarter results and posted a net loss of $1.5 million for the same time period.. When you’re just curious about your house’s value, why give all your contact to a real estate agent when you can get a ballpark figure from Zillow? Agents may continue to pay for leads, but they’re not going to keep paying if the leads are worthless.
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer sent me this update on their blogs:
Traffic dipped a bit on the P-I’s reader blogs in October, but the effort by reader-writers passed an important milestone: As of last month, more than 1,029,878 pages have been viewed on reader blogs — more in a million page views since we began eight months ago. Just 26,000 pages were viewed that first month, compared to 173,461 in October! And three of your blogs have already passed 100,000 page views: Bus Chick, Seattle Real Estate Professionals and Mariner Housewife.
The most popular reader blog on the site was the Huskies fan blog (18,264 page views), followed by the Hawks’ fan blog (16,351) which was just narrowly more viewed than the Real Estate Pros blog (16,335).
So the only thing more popular than real estate was sports. That explains why an Open House can be so dead on a Seahawks Sunday.
November 3rd, 2006 at 8:55 pm
This seems as good of a place to ask as any, but why blog? My hits to my web site are up, but so what?
In the past month I’ve read and written in different Real Estate blogs. What fascinates me is that all of a sudden a bunch of whack jobs are telling me my business. Yes, I said whack jobs; that includes bloggers and commenters (sp?).
This blog makes some sense now that I see what’s being said other places.
The trick or treat statistics I’ve used in conversations. The Realtor.com and Trulia posts added something to my way of thinking. On the other hand many things being promoted as Real Estate information are just self promotion. Most posts don’t make any sense.
Don’t even get me started on the bubble blogging. That’s a hoot, but purely for entertainment value. If any one of those guys, and I know they’re guys, ever asked for advice they might get a better grip on reality.
So I have a group of guys working on my new web site that will include a blog. My question is why is this a good idea?
November 3rd, 2006 at 10:43 pm
Good question, Dave.
Every blogger has a different reason. In some industries, it’s important to communicate directly with the public. It’s hard to do that in an interactive way on a static website.
Other blogs are strictly for profit. They provide some content but have either Google Ads or some other Pay-per-click campaign on their site. Others, like http://www.UnusualLife.com, features ads from Amazon for books relevant to the subject of the site.
Some people blog to raise the profile of themselves or their business or as a way to offer something extra or explain the benefits of their business.
Some folks have actually blogged their way into new jobs and positions.
Other folks have so much to say and no where to say it and so have discovered blogging as a way to get it all out.
The majority of people in the world don’t know what a blog is and don’t care.
Think hard before starting a blog. Do you have anything to say, is it important and does anyone care? Does it make sense? Your writing is a window into your mind. If your writing doesn’t make a lot of sense, people will assume you don’t either.