There’s always something to howl about.

Category: The Odysseus Medal (page 1 of 7)

Google and the artifacts of inefficiency

The interwebs are BUZZING about Google Buzz and how benevolent Google co-opted everyone’s contact lists from their Gmail accounts. I wonder how many million valid email addresses Google captured in the first 30 minutes of Buzz going live? I try to remember that Google is the same benevolent company that assisted the Chinese communists in censoring the internet for the billlions imprisoned in the PRC. More recently Google has gotten a Federal bailout in the form of assistance from the NSA to secure Google’s servers from the same ChiCom hackers they used to happily work with ‘doing no evil’, except for entrenching the folks who invented the involuntary liver donation.

The point is this: be aware of the cost of “free stuff”, no matter how cool. The price may be more than you are willing to pay in terms of your professional reputation. I would suggest that a cost benefit analysis is in order. What is the cost in professional reputation for all your social media efforts? Are your friend lists, contact lists and customer rosters available for any non-#RTB data scraper to start spamming with listing flyers? It is surely something to think about.

I don’t care if Google renders a contextual ad in my gmail account. I do care if my clients start getting real estate spam from competitors. Below is a relevant video.

I received the Nobel Prize in Real Estate Today!

Sorry if I’ve been a bit punchy – I think there’s a 9 hour time difference between Stockholm and Berkeley.. and those guys call on their schedule, so they woke me up in the middle of the night.  This is a picture of my neighbor Albert, and he plays a role in the story … keep reading on.

Albert Ghiorso who discovered more elements than any humanoid in the galaxy

The phone call came early this morning!

I’d heard the rumors, but was thrilled to find out that I received the 2009 Nobel Prize for Real Estate!

It was awarded for two different discoveries:

The Quantum Theory Of Home Buying and
The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of Real Estate

Quantum Theory
After a buyer writes an offer on a home, they either get the house… or they don’t get the house – there is no other state

Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle
The act of writing an offer on a home changes the home’s final sales price… even if you’re uncertain as to what the other offers are.

If there are multiple offers on a home, and you write a low priced offer, your probability of getting the home is very low. You affect the outcome, because someone who really wants the home will raise their bid and the home sells for a higher price!

And how does Albert Ghiorso fit into the quest for my Unified Real Estate Database Field Theory of Data Integration? He’s my inspiration.

Albert, one of our 90-something year spry neighbors, was co-discoverer of more elements than any other person in the galaxy! Albert’s Wikipedia entry lists the following elements:

* Americium ca. 1945 (element 95)
* Curium in 1944 (element 96)
* Berkelium in 1949 (element 97)
* Californium in 1950 (element 98)
* Einsteinium in 1952 (element 99)
* Fermium in 1953 (element 100)
* Mendelevium in 1955 (element 101)
* Nobelium in 1958-59 (element 102)
* Lawrencium in 1961 (element 103)
* Rutherfordium in 1969 (element 104)
* Dubnium in 1970 (element 105)
* Seaborgium in 1974 (element 106)

Cogito Ergo Blogo in Berkelium Californium Americium

Degrees Of Separation
I looked at the San Francisco Chronicle’s list of Bay Area Nobel Prize winners, and realized I was one or two degrees of separation from several…. one neighbor works with someone who won the award in Read more

The Odysseus Medal competition will be postponed this week

We’re busy with real estate stuff, and I’m grinding on all gears to push engenu out the door. Plus which, there were only 65 nominations, suggesting, perhaps, that the rest of the world has Teri’s Spring fever.

In the mean time, here’s a blog post from Mark Steyn illustrating why a reactive, me-too, catch-up strategy is likely to fail in the net.world:

Old media dinosaurs looking to the Internet to make up for declining print sales will find this analysis disquieting:

In the first three months of this year, the average amount of time visitors spent on newspaper sites fell by 2.9% to 44 minutes and 18 seconds per month, or less than 1½ minutes per day. In the same period, the average number of pages viewed per unique site visitor dropped by 6.6% to 47.2 per month…

The decline in the average duration of sessions at newspaper web pages suggests that visitors are not utilizing the industry’s sites as primary destinations, but, rather, as places to episodically view individual articles highlighted by Google News, Drudge, Digg, blogs or any of the thousands of other places they might be.

So, if you happen to see a link at, say, NRO to something in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, you’ll click and read it, and then go away and not return to the paper until you click another link that tickles your fancy. That’s a hard model to sell to advertisers.

American newspapers have only themselves to blame. Instead of recognizing the necessity to reinvent their approach online, for the most part they simply transferred their old dullness to the new technology. Their print drabness derived mostly from the complacency of their local monopoly, and that’s the one thing you can’t transfer to the Internet. It will take more than the web to save these sclerotic franchises.

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The Odysseus Medal: “This stuff is simple to learn. No heavy lifting.”

Sunny and 93 degrees outside right now. This is warm for April, but not hugely so. I rode my bike when I should have been writing this post. Dock my pay. I deserve it.

There was a lot of great stuff on the nets this week, but nothing totally slayed me, so I’m not awarding an Odysseus Medal. We’ll see what next week brings. (I’ve already see one insanely great Black Pearl.) Here are this week’s awards:

The Black Pearl Award this week goes to Russell Shaw for I Want To Be A Lister – The Listing Presentation – The Objections:

About a year ago I wrote what was really part 1 of The Listing Presentation. Anyone wanting to increase their listing skills will likely find time spent on this post and that first post time well spent. I have mentioned the short list of different things a seller might say (or objections they might have to listing) to you. All good listers know these objections and are not startled or thrown off by the seller bringing them up. In fact, great listers know the objections so well that they want the seller to bring them up and if the seller does not bring them up the agent will bring them up. That’s correct. If you already know what they are thinking, why not just address it before they even mention it? It is usually fun to hit a softball when it is a slow underhand pitch.

As the nature of the objections has never really changed it is really sort of silly for any agent wanting to take a lot of listings to not know – in advance – that these are the concerns of the seller. I know that the internet and these new-brand-new-all-new-discount-really-really-low-maybe-even-no-commission companies have changed the very nature of life on earth, as we know it – but I am pretty sure the main objections that you could hear from a home seller back in 1968 were still the same in 1978.  They are still the same in 2008. I am thinking they may be still quite similar in 2048. Just Read more

The Odysseus Medal competition — Voting for the People’s Choice Award is open

We have 17 entries on the short list this week, out of a long long list of 60 posts. This week I’m showing nothing but Black Pearls, practical hard-headed ideas for working better, faster and more profitably.

Vote for the People’s Choice Award here. You can use the voting interface to see each nominated post, so comparison is easy.

Ahem: Please don’t spam all your friends to come and vote for you. First, what we’re interested in is what is popular among people who would have been voting anyway. And second, I’ll eliminate you for cheating. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

Voting runs through to 12 Noon MST Monday. I’ll announce the winners of this week’s awards soon thereafter.

Here is this week’s short-list of Odysseus Medal nominees:

< ?PHP $AltEntries = array ( "Barry Cunningham -- What Would You Do? What Would You Do?”,
“Brian Brady — How to save a declined loan
Mortgage 911“,
“Chris Johnson — Blogging is Not Prospecting Blogging is Not Prospecting, Or Even Close.“,
“Courtney Tuttle — 10 Ways to Improve Blog Traffic 10 Ways to Improve Blog Traffic in 30 Minutes or Less“,
“Dan Green — Do-It-Yourself Divorce Why A Do-It-Yourself Divorce Requires Professional Mortgage Advice“,
“Dave Smith — A Tool to Help Pick Keyword Targets A Tool to Help Pick Keyword Targets“,
“Eric Blackwell — Seller / REALTOR relationship What a Seller / REALTOR relationship should NOT feel like.“,
“Jonathan Dalton — Why Blogging is Prospecting Roll Over, Secretariat – Why Blogging is Prospecting“,
“Loren Nason — Who is Your Webhost and Why it Matters Who is Your Webhost and Why it Matters“,
“Mary McKnight — How to use demographics How to use demographics to craft real estate blog posts that target your readers“,
“Richard Warren — Real Estate Wholesaler So You Want To Be A Real Estate Wholesaler?“,
“Russell Shaw — The Objections I Want To Be A Lister – The Listing Presentation – The Objections“,
“Steve Leung — Generating a Lead Using an E-Book The Anatomy of Generating a Lead Using an E-Book“,
“Teresa Boardman — Know when to Walk Know when to Walk“,
“Teri Lussier — Working with engenu Working with engenu; a painless geek tool even an ‘I’ can love!“,
“Tony Schuricht — start investing in real estate again Five reasons to start investing in real estate Read more

What happens when a hi-tech entrepreneur sells real estate in Silicon Valley? Introducing Steven Leung, our newest contributor

Steve Leung was the second person to win The Odysseus Medal. This was before I started the formal competition, but, at the time, I made a standing offer to Steven to join us if he wanted to do. More than a year later, here he is:

Steven Leung has too many credentials to list: An MIT graduate, he has worked for Microsoft, Oracle and several internet start-ups. He brings that hi-tech experience to the hi-tech Silicon Valley real estate market.

If you read the Silicon Valley Real Estate Blog, you know the kind of thoroughgoing analysis Steven brings to real estate. I’m delighted to have him here.

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The Odysseus Medal: “It makes no difference what has happened. That is the past. Live in the future. Create it.”

I think I have a pretty good track record at picking contributors for BloodhoundBlog. The people who write here are a cut above, clearly, but I think what sets them apart is that they are all so interested in getting better. We’re all constantly reading, learning, thinking, inventing, re-inventing, and we all end up driving each other to new ideas. I love this, as you might guess, since it pushes me to do better, also.

Here’s a true confession: When Russell Shaw approached me to write with us, I wasn’t quite sure what to do about him. It was still just me and Cathy in those days. We knew of Russell, of course — no one who lives in Phoenix does not know of Russell Shaw. I have no idea what Russell’s firing clause looks like, but I built our firing clause from the literal words on his radio commercial: “Fire me at any time.”

Even so, I would not have thought to trust the Russell Shaw I knew through the radio. I had no reason to distrust him, nothing except the generalized mistrust in which I hold all Realtors I don’t know. In truth, there are a lot of genuinely nice people out there, but our business attracts more than its share of crooks, misanthropes and morons. I had no reason to think ill of Russell, but I had no reason to think well of him, either.

Two facts swung the balance for me. Second was Russell’s having mentioned that he had read Hugh Hewitt’s book on weblogging. Anyone who actually prepares for a new undertaking can’t be all bad. But first, I had read in The Millionaire Real Estate Agent that Russell knew that in the previous year his team had gotten 519 listings from 912 listing appointments. My impression of Russell was changed from then on — not the production, but the presence of mind to have tracked the statistics.

You can laugh at me, if you want, for having been so careful about what has turned out to be such a great decision. BloodhoundBlog is what it is because we don’t Read more

The Odysseus Medal competition — Voting for the People’s Choice Award is open

We have 14 entries on the short list this week, out of a long long list of 96 posts. I’ve already decided on the winner of the Odysseus Medal, so I’m not linking that way. This week’s Short List is all Zillow Mortgage Marketplace posts, all of them written by lenders. If you’re not interested, you’re just not interested, but I can’t imagine how you wouldn’t be.

Four of the Short List contestants wrote two posts each, so I’m going to count a vote for either as a vot for that person. If one of them wins, I’ll split the People’s Choice Award between both posts.

Vote for the People’s Choice Award here. You can use the voting interface to see each nominated post, so comparison is easy.

Ahem: Please don’t spam all your friends to come and vote for you. First, what we’re interested in is what is popular among people who would have been voting anyway. And second, I’ll eliminate you for cheating. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

Voting runs through to 12 Noon MST Monday. I’ll announce the winners of this week’s awards soon thereafter.

Here is this week’s short-list of Odysseus Medal nominees:

< ?PHP $AltEntries = array ( "Brian Brady -- Zillow Mortgage Bourse Zillow Mortgage Bourse: How To Acquire Long-Term Clients”,
“Brian Brady — Zillow Mortgage Marketplace
Zillow Mortgage Marketplace: One Way Transparency Like A Bad Online Dating Site“,
“Dan Melson — Zillow\’s New Mortgage Quote Forum Zillow’s New Mortgage Quote Forum“,
“Gina Gardner — Zillow Mortgage Reflects National Trends Dog Eat Dog: Zillow Mortgage Reflects National Trends in Selling“,
“Jeff Corbett — Zillows Mortgage Community Zillows Mortgage Community. The Consumer is Ready, But is The Mortgage Professional?“,
“Jeff Corbett — Zillows Mortgage Community, On The Cusp Zillows Mortgage Community, On The Cusp of an Anonymous Transparent Credit and Personal Information eXchange Between Mortgage Professionals and Consumer, to Create a Highly Trusted Mortgage Transaction Community“,
“Morgan Brown — Zillow Mortgage Launches Zillow Mortgage Launches – How do you rate?“,
“Rhonda Porter — Zillow Launches On-Line Mortgage Quotes Zillow Launches On-Line Mortgage Rate Quotes“,
“Rhonda Porter — Zillows On Line Mortgage Leads Zillow’s On Line Mortgage Leads: Is It For You?“,
“Todd Carpenter — I have a war to fight I don’t have Read more

The Odysseus Medal: “I feel like I too, am losing market share quickly in this wildly out of control time warp where one second I’m a kid and the next, I’m in my 50s selling real estate in a down market.”

The Odysseus Medal this week goes to Geno Petro for Geno’s Wrong (bang a gong):

My mother brings in a ham sandwich on a kaiser roll from the kitchen. It has mayo, mustard and a pickle on it. Onion, too. I rarely eat any of those things but I dare not say a word for fear of offending her.  “Diet Coke?” she asks.

“No mom…you know what Paris Hilton says about Diet Coke, don’t you?”

“Oh, I don’t like her.” declares Mitzi.

“What?” my dad pipes in, apparently with a different opinion of the media icon.

“Only fat people drink Diet Coke,” I say.

“Fat people?”

“Yeah, it’s a joke I think.” I say,  now wondering myself if it’s even funny. They don’t get it and now, I don’t get it either. My wife Mona, is taking a nap upstairs, belly full with as many sandwiches as she’s probably eaten in a month. The volume is turned down on the television and closed captions are streaming across the top third of the screen, covering  the faces of everyone on the Fox News Network. My parents read, watch and comment unfavorably whenever someone bashes Hillary or Obama and hiss in unison when anything positive is said about Bush or the War. I ask them why they even watch Fox at all if they are Democrats but they don’t really get the question. I guess I don’t really get it either in this particular election year. Perhaps they just have trouble working the remote and are afraid to mess with the Dish. There are Post-it notes taped to everything electronic in the house and most things static, as well.

And despite what I have just witnessed, I feel like I too, am losing market share quickly in this wildly out of control time warp where one second I’m a kid and the next, I’m in my 50s selling real estate in a down market.  In 10 minutes, I’ll be my father looking for any small victory I can muster. I sometimes feel as if I’m lagging behind all the youth and technology in my chosen industry of real estate. I have to read something three times before it makes sense, lately. I can only Read more

The Odysseus Medal competition — Voting for the People’s Choice Award is open

We have 13 entries on the short list this week, out of a long long list of 74 posts. I’ve already decided on the winner of the Odysseus Medal, so I’m not linking that way. Instead, again this week I’m showing nothing but Black Pearls, practical hard-headed ideas for working better, faster and more profitably.

Vote for the People’s Choice Award here. You can use the voting interface to see each nominated post, so comparison is easy.

Ahem: Please don’t spam all your friends to come and vote for you. First, what we’re interested in is what is popular among people who would have been voting anyway. And second, I’ll eliminate you for cheating. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

Voting runs through to 12 Noon MST Monday. I’ll announce the winners of this week’s awards soon thereafter.

Here is this week’s short-list of Odysseus Medal nominees:

< ?PHP $AltEntries = array ( "Barry Cunningham -- Marketer, Advertiser or a Salesperson? Are you a Marketer, Advertiser or a Salesperson?”,
“Barry Cunningham — Sun Tzu and the Art of the Short Sale
Sun Tzu and the Art of the Short Sale“,
“Chris Johnson — Rapport Rapport: You Don’t Matter. You Are Here To Add Value“,
“Daniel Rothamel — Getting Myself Organized Getting Myself Organized (with a little help from Chris Brogan)“,
“Darren Rowse — Should I Change My Website Into a Blog? Should I Change My Website Into a Blog?“,
“Jeff Turner — Panasonic Lumix FX35 vs. Kodak v705 Panasonic Lumix FX35 vs. Kodak v705“,
“Jim Cronin — Blogging SEO All You Ever Needed To Know About Blogging SEO, But Were Afraid To Say So.“,
“John Coley — Talk Like a Woman? Can My Real Estate Blog Help Me Talk Like a Woman?“,
“Mark Collier — 10 Easy Ways to Grow Your Blog Traffic 10 Easy Ways to Grow Your Blog Traffic“,
“Mary McKnight — 1 Month of blog topics 1 Month of blog topics: Ultimate guide to building real estate blog content that gets results“,
“Mary McKnight — Real Estate blogs are stores Real Estate blogs are stores, not newspapers – so blog like you are selling houses, not writing for your local paper“,
“Sean Purcell — What’s Your Six Month Plan? What’s Your Six Month Plan?“,
“Tony Schuricht — Make your buyers Read more

The Odysseus Medal: “Lions in the wild seem about ten times more alive”

The Odysseus Medal this week goes to another truly amazing essay from outside our little RE.net cloister. I knew when I saw this on Saturday that it had won. Teri Lussier convinced me on Sunday that I have a leadership opportunity with the ten dozen people following me on Twitter — so I led them to this article. What is it? You weren’t meant to have a boss by Paul Graham. Ostensibly he’s writing about programmers, but that’s a superficial characteristic. What he’s writing about is the nature of human beings. What he’s writing about it you:

A few days ago I was sitting in a cafe in Palo Alto and a group of programmers came in on some kind of scavenger hunt. It was obviously one of those corporate “team-building” exercises.

They looked familiar. I spend nearly all my time working with programmers in their twenties and early thirties. But something seemed wrong about these. There was something missing.

And yet the company they worked for is considered a good one, and from what I overheard of their conversation, they seemed smart enough. In fact, they seemed to be from one of the more prestigious groups within the company.

So why did it seem there was something odd about them?

I have a uniquely warped perspective, because nearly all the programmers I know are startup founders. We’ve now funded 80 startups with a total of about 200 founders, nearly all of them programmers. I spend a lot of time with them, and not much with other programmers. So my mental image of a young programmer is a startup founder.

The guys on the scavenger hunt looked like the programmers I was used to, but they were employees instead of founders. And it was startling how different they seemed.

So what, you may say. So I happen to know a subset of programmers who are especially ambitious. Of course less ambitious people will seem different. But the difference between the programmers I saw in the cafe and the ones I was used to wasn’t just a difference of degree. Something seemed wrong.

I think it’s not so much that Read more

The Short List goes to the dogs: Voting for the People’s Choice Award is open

By the time I had time to deal with The Odysseus Medal last week, it was pretty late in the week. The week had been pretty light on nominations, and we were heading into Easter, so I made a command decision to combine these two weeks into one award.

Then today, when I went to look at The Long List, I found a whole lot of Bloodhounds in there. There were a total of 70 unique posts from 17 of our current contributors. Just short of 40% of all of the nominated posts were written by Bloodhounds.

You can say what you want about this weblog. It seems to be some sort of badge of dishonor to make snarky remarks about BloodhoundBlog or its contributors. About this I have one thought only — predictably a marketing issue: If your clients observe you talking trash about us behind our backs, might they not reasonably conclude that you are also spewing bile about them behind their backs? Everything you do establishes your character in the eyes of your clients — now more than ever before. That’s a Black Pearl — and the more you want to reject it, the more valuable it is.

In any case, I don’t give a rat’s ass what anyone says, but I care a great deal about what people can demonstrate. The quality of work our contributors do, here and at their home blogs, is a potent demonstration of its own — a demonstration of the quality of minds who work here, and, I think, of the quality of thought we inspire in each other.

In consequence, this week’s People’s Choice is given over to BloodhoundBlog contributors, to one post from each of them who made this week’s Long List.

We end with with a total of 17 People’s Choice nominees. You can vote for the People’s Choice Award here. You can use the voting interface to see each nominated post, so comparison is easy.

Voting runs through to 12 Noon MST Monday. I’ll announce the winners of this week’s awards soon thereafter.

Here is this week’s short-list of Odysseus Medal nominees:

< ?PHP $AltEntries = array Read more

The Odysseus Medal: A breathtaking Daisy in the deserts of the mind

I was talking to Teri Lussier in email last week about Desert Daisies, an annual wildflower you find in the Sonoran Desert. People harvest the seeds and bring them home, and the flowers will eventually take over the whole yard — for the few weeks they’re around.

Beautiful little clarions of Spring, announcing in advance the blossoming of the citrus trees — when Phoenix is at its ultimate perfect best and god himself is green with envy.

When I picked Teri to be my partner in last Spring’s ProjectBlogger competition, I chose better than I knew. I admired her spark, her spunkiness — what the Irish might call the soul of a poet. But I could not have foreseen her depths — although I have been more than delighted to discover them over the last year. I hope BloodhoundBlog has been good for her. I know she has been very good for BloodhoundBlog. Working here and at TheBrickRanch.com, she has blossomed into a powerhouse weblogger.

So it’s a delight for me to announce that Teri Lussier is the first person to win The Odysseus Medal, The Black Pearl Award and The People’s Choice Award all in the same week.

The winning entry? Zillow creates the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine, of course.

I know some poor benighted soul will have to go digging for evidence of corruption, so I will tell you now that the fact that Teri and I happen to be on the same side of the issue of real estate licensing had nothing to do with my choice. She hit not just a home run but a grand slam with her essay, and the position she took says nothing at all about the quality of her work — except insofar as writing the heartfelt truth puts the writer at one with the gods.

I normally quote from winning entries, but, in this case, I want you to go and read Teri’s whole post. Print it out and tape it to your monitor. Inscribe it into your mind as a particularly worthy example of the truth Read more