I was beyond delighted at the way things worked out in the first Odysseus Medal competition. Even so, I want to make few changes in the rules.
Ordinary weblogging carnivals are all about link-baiting. The idea is for you to get your weblog linked by the host weblog, and for the host weblog to get linked by all the entrants, and, with luck, some other weblogs as well. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, but it does explain why the quality of the entries can be of less than paramount importance.
This is not what we’re about, so why should we approach things that way? I’m happy to link back to entrants, but I expect we’re linking back all the time to most of the people we will hear from, anyway. We’re not interested in linking, in or out, we’re interested in the best quality real estate weblogging we can unearth.
So: The rules are changed to this:
The Rules (few and fair):
- The entry must have been posted within the two weeks before the entry deadline
- The entrant need not be the author of the post
- More than one entry from the same weblog is fine
- More than one entry from the same person is also fine, with those entries coming from one or more weblogs
- No second-guessing, no do-overs, no cry-babies
Rules #2 and #4 have been changed. There’s no reason a third party cannot enter a particularly excellent post. When I’ve given out The Odysseus Medal in the past, no one was entering anything; I was picking out work I thought was worth celebrating. You should be able to do the same. The change in rule #4 simply acknowledges that some of the biggest names in the RE.net are writing all over the place. We want to honor their best work no matter how many examples of it are submitted.
I’ve also built a sidebar button, 160 pixels wide, that you can use to promote The Odysseus Medal competition, if you want:
You can see this in our sidebar. It looks like this:
That image links back to the information page for the competition.
We’re ramping up for another round of judging. Don’t forget to enter your best work. As always, the entry form is here.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
Derek Burress says:
I am not sure if carnivals are worth it anymore. Everyone says write for the consumer and when we start writing for consmers, we talk about things like how to make your mover easier, how to save money and at times, when we’re writing for the consumers, its almost like we have given up real estate blogging and entered some other domain. Like writing about credit cards, how to take care of your debt, etc. We write this because we know mortgage lenders looks at those things and we want to help prospective home buyers be able to qualify but the truth is, when we write for consumers we leave the real estate blogging behind and enter some other niche.
I can write about title insurance, different types of property, real estate laws and stuff all day for the consumer but that gets boring after a while you know. That is real estate consumer blogging but is it really?
Carnivals don’t seem to notice what true consumer blogging is and when we venture in a different direction, our articles are non-revelant to real estate it seems but is it really?
Real estate, baseball and history which I seem to write a lot about is all tied together. But people do not realize it. Title insurce would never been needed if people knew th history of the property. Baseball is about location in the locker room. You made it to the bigs when you get a locker on murder row – where all the big stars are.
Religion – real estate is sort of mentioned in the Bible. Besides all wars are about land somewaht even those oil wars.
Americans try to invade, fail, and eventually give up and hire a real estate agent to buy the darn land from their rivals. LOL
August 15, 2007 — 10:33 am