The soul of a bigger Bloodhound: Anticipating BloodhoundBlog.TV

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We’re about to grow to be a much bigger dog. We’re a media play to begin with — news and views, not sales and service. People lecture us all the time that we don’t get real estate weblogging, a point we might dispute. Weblogging about the real estate business, on the other hand, we do better than anyone.

What we have coming is a new idea on a new domain, BloodhoundBlog.TV. (There’s nothing there yet; we’re too busy building the underlying technology.)

Yawn! Yet another claque of clamorous real estate videos?

Not on your life.

We’re going at this BloodhoundBlog way, as webloggers: Serious about important ideas, always, but never stuffy or stilted — and never in anyone’s thrall. We’re going to do the same kinds of things we do here — in streaming, iPod-ready video.

Here are some kinds of content we might take on:

• The Talking Head, like Andy Rooney or Bill O’Reilly. This is akin to a weblog post, but it’s harder to do well than to imagine having done well. It works best from a well-rehearsed script, but some of the best YouTube videos we have linked to fall into this category.
• How-To/Spot News/Actuality. This is like HGTV or a news broadcast. Plenty of room for creativity here: multiple locations, multiple interviews, music, still images or film clips.
• Interviews. This is what we think of right now when we think of a general interest real estate video podcast. With a camcorder or a decent webcam, we can do this anywhere. Connecting through the Studio BHB set-up (about which more below), we can make a fairly tightly edited two-shot remote interview on the fly.
• Group Discussions. This depends on Studio BHB. A group of us, contributors or guests, can come together in a video-conference, which we can store as a video. I’ve worked out a way to edit this kind of conference to make a visually compelling presentation on the fly.

We are planning to do a weekly BloodhoundBlog.TV broadcast, combining the first three types of segments with a group discussion about those segments, about the real estate news of the week and about our particular favorites among that week’s Odysseus Medal nominees.

As with everything we do, we’re going about it all wrong — at least if you listen to the would-be experts. People doing real estate video now are producing what seem to me to be painfully short clips — with painfully starched frozen smiles. We’re headed in completely the opposite direction. It will take us a while to hit our stride, but I would like for the weekly BloodhoundBlog.TV broadcast to be an hour long, every week. We’ll split the broadcast by segments for long tail purposes, and possibly also make them available in audio podcast form as well.

The Studio BHB technology is something new under the sun, a mash-up of existing technologies to create — as an analogue to Desktop Publishing — Desktop Television. Multi-camera, multi-location, multi-feed real-time audio and video edited on the fly into a cohesive presentation. It’s not as slick as a real television mixing console, but it gives us our own TV station. And remember, the manifesto is: Disintermediate the bums!

What’s in it for you? More content to feed your hungry mind, of course. But my goal is to grow BloodhoundBlog to the point that we really are disintermediating the bums. Everyone has the right to speak, and to be heard by all who care to listen. But we as real estate professionals have those same rights, and this is a way to amplify our voices.

So: I’m recruiting. We are always interested in adding new writers, but this can be a pretty intimidating place to write. But we’re also interested in snaring all the apposite video content we can grab. Through Studio BHB, we have the ability to produce remote interviews as video casts almost as easily as we now produce remote audio podcasts. Working with your camcorder, you can produce stand-ups, interviews, news or how-to segments, etc. And if you are planning to be at a major real estate event — say the NAR convention, for instance — we would love to gang-interview you through Studio BHB.

Since we became a group blog last December, I’ve been very careful to tread lightly in recruiting, mainly waiting for people to approach me. That hasn’t changed, except that I am being more aggressive in my direct appeal: We are the biggest and the best for good reason. We are doing everything we can think of to grow ever bigger, ever better. If you can produce first-rate content of interest to real estate professionals, your work belongs here.

My promise: There is always something to howl about. Come howl with us — in text, in video, in both.

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