Author: Greg Swann (page 109 of 209)

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Continuing, briefly with the idea of chokepoints and the economics of abundance:

Broadcasting — radio and television — offers us a perfect example of how much bigger the economics of abundance is than mere data processing.

Broadcast outlets, at their beginning, were both natural and man-made chokepoints: There were a limited number of available frequencies, and access to them was regulated by fiat of law. Cost-based chokepoints affected the other major media of the era — newspapers and magazines. This resulted in very lucrative markets for the owners of mass media outlets — and in media products that tended to be at least as dissatisfying to consumers as they were appealing.

But then three things happened:

1. Printing got a lot more efficient, creating the era of narrowcasting in publications — not one generic bike-riding article a year in Look magazine, but a dozen specialized monthlies just for different flavors of serious bike racers — with a dozen more for mountain biking, and a dozen more for bicycle fitness training.
2. As a consequence of better scientific research in electro-magnetics, electronics, signal-processing and information theory, the radio spectrum itself became much more abundantly divisible — creating still newer kinds of narrow-casting, right down to cell phones and private-network walkie-talkies.
3. Finally, the internet itself resulted in a massive explosion of available bandwidth in mix-and-match wired and wireless networks.

What’s the result? One of the richest businesses in the entire history of chokepoints is being disintermediated into oblivion. Sic semper tyrannosauris.

Emphasizing that, I cannot get enough of this movie:

Technorati Tags: blogging, disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing, technology

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I have been talking about the economics of abundance literally from Day One of BloodhoundBlog:

In a subsistence culture, the work of the mind is precious and literally unsupportable. We are by now so rich that millions of people can create intellectual resources that they give away, in turn to be remarketed by others.

I was talking about phenomena like weblogging and open-source software, but, ironically enough, I was also talking about an article by Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson.

This week Anderson is back with another important article, this one called Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business. He’s writing about the net.economy, and what he has to say is fascinating, even if I think he might be missing the bigger picture. He’s also writing in support of his new book, a for-pay product I don’t intend to pay for.

Anderson likens the idea of free razors, which we’ve also talked about, with the modern net model of using free web-based software to create massively-viral effects. Interestingly, he documents six broad categories of no-cost-to-the-user internet business models.

His thesis is that the plummeting cost of data-processing hardware, coupled with a software-cost-per-user that approaches zero, requires vendors of web-based information and services to find other ways to monetize their efforts. If one vendor won’t cut the price to zero, the next one will.

We’ve been talking about this much, too, also since the birth of BloodhoundBlog:

[T]he people most immediately affected are the ones who are currently paid a salary or wages based on the sale of information. Either the information is going to get much, much better — or the number of paychecks is going to get much, much smaller.

Stewart Brand said “information wants to be free”. This has intellectual property implications far beyond ordinary information. But with respect to that ordinary information — news, opinion, fiction, poetry, almost all music, etc. — the war is over. Hoarding lost. The challenge amidst this vast abundance is not getting people to pay for your information — but simply getting them to pay attention to it.

The daily newspaper has no hope whatever of nicking me for fifty cents. Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

[I’ve amended this post somewhat based on our recent experiences with CraigsList, which are discussed in the comments. The point of this post is not CraigsList, but, rather, learning how to extract HTML from existing code, this as a means of learning to write HTML on your own. In the comments, a number of vendor solutions are discussed, and these my be worth exploring, if only as a prophylactic against censorious behavior by CraigsList users. But your need to produce professional-looking HTML can extend far beyond the major on-line services. As an example, Cathleen Collins pulled buyers out of an ad we were able to post on a church’s bulletin-board-like system. –GSS]

 
A couple-few weeks ago, I was on a conference call with Jerry Matthews. He’s a one-time grand poohbah in Realtor Association politics, but now he works as a consultant to the NAR and certain state-level Associations. I was the waxed-fruit-flavor-of-the-day in a series of calls with Association executives, so that they might take the pulse of market innovators. I think I might have been the Designated Radical. If so, I promise you I did not disappoint.

As one stage, I was talking about how new licensees might market themselves cheaply in what is, for now, a hard world to get a break in. I mentioned a lot of different ideas, including CraigsList.com, which may be the single most effective advertising medium available to Realtors or lenders right now.

I said, “Of course, most CraigsList ads stink, so, with just a little bit of HTML you can really make yourself stand out?”

“But how is a new agent supposed to know anything about HTML?” someone asked.

I didn’t say, “Young people know a lot more than you give them credit for.” Instead, I pointed out that weblogging software like WordPress creates HTML for you, even if you don’t know what it’s doing.

So you could do something like this:

1. Create a weblog post about a house you’ve listed — or, with explicit permission, that another agent has listed
2. Write a good, compelling headline about why buyers should want to see that house
3. Write good, clean — error free — Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We listen to Bebop Jazz in the office. If I talk about music, I tend to talk about Rock ‘n’ Roll or Country, just because they’re more inclusive. Bebop is demanding music even for Jazz, definitely an acquired taste.

Instrumental music is good at work, of course, since you can play it fairly quietly, and since there are no words (except “Salt Peanuts!”) to interfere with your thinking.

I would argue that complex compositions — like Classical or Modern, Progressive or Cool Jazz — will tend to improve the quality of your thoughts, through time, since your mind has to work so much harder to process the music. Constant exercise for the muscle of the mind should make you a stronger thinker. It seems reasonable to me that a familiarity with musical cadences will make you a better writer, as well.

Lately we’ve been tuned into the Bebop station at Yahoo’s LaunchCast on-line radio portal. Like all LaunchCast stations, the playlist could be a lot longer, but it’s a pretty nice representation of the Bebop idea in Jazz: Bird, Monk, Dizzy, Dex, Mingus, Trane, Miles. A little bit of Art Tatum, which I love, and a little Hard Bop, which I loathe. Bud Powell and Cannonball Adderley to show the world how a sound this demanding can still be fun. If you really want to listen, you have to go to your own record collection. But for the office, it’s the best solution we’ve found so far.

photo credit: MikeLove

That’s all beside the point, though. You either like Jazz or you don’t, and many people don’t. But the quote from Monk in the headline

“We wanted a music that they couldn’t play.”

is practically a mission statement for Web 2.0-empowered Realtors and lenders.

Bebop was born during a musician’s union strike in 1942-43. Players who had been working as sidemen in Big Band and Swing orchestras would spend their idle days together in two Harlem nightclubs, jamming for each other. Over a very short span of time they created a brand new form of music, with a brand new music theory all its own.

The “they” in Monk’s Read more