There’s always something to howl about.

Seven years of the dawgs: Reflections on BloodhoundBlog’s anniversary.

We started here, and still the question rings in my ear:

If almost-as-good is free or nearly free, what is the market value of slightly-better?

Big changes in the world since then. Brick ’n’ mortar retail is all but dead. Books, records and software ‘apps’ are aiming for a price point under ninety-nine cents — many of them all the way under. The supermarket real estate magazines are gone, and the thinning out of the classifieds put the newspapers on a strict diet. Their putative replacements, realty.bots like Zooliapads.com, are by now just sleazoid lead vendors. Unwired Realtors are enjoying their retirements while we are doing business without a fax line or even a land line.

That much is cool. I’m less sanguine about the people in this business than I am about the business itself. One of the things I haven’t loved about real estate has been seeing some of the incredibly scummy things people will do. Most of my clients have been great, and I love all of the people I work with long-term. But I’ve fired people who have left shit on my shoes forever, and this is not a happy outcome for me.

BloodhoundBlog has been a similarly-mixed blessing. I’ve met some wonderful people through this blog, and we’ve published some remarkable content. But I’ve seen the howling mob at its worst, and every day I get to see sleazy SEOs working overtime to make me regret sharing link juice with commenters. And meanwhile, the vendorsluts and their raving wraiths have turned our part of the internet into just another Realtors’ brothel. Don’t get any on ya.

And I am off to Planet Elsewhere. I wanted to hit the road for a while in the first quarter, but my Mammy died and then Odysseus started looking all deathful. So here I am mounting the expedition in the third quarter instead. I’m going to be in Las Vegas for the last three weeks (three nundinae, actually, but who’s counting?) of July, and then I will be in Orlando for the last three nundinae of August. I’m interested in making plans for September, October and beyond if you would like to see me in your town.

Meanwhile, there is the question of what to do about BloodhoundBlog. I’m not writing here much, nor is anyone else. I think this is a valuable resource, especially when the entirety of the vendorslut mafia is howling as one mob. But it’s stoopid to have thirty mug shots staring at us from the sidebar and have all but none of them writing new content.

So I need for the dawgs to figure out what they want from this place. When I come back from Sin City, I’ll reconfigure the roster accordingly.

Your call: What happens next?