Author: Greg Swann (page 157 of 209)

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I replaced Teri Lussier’s photo this morning. I’m talking about the little thumbnail photos you see running down the sidebar. Guys are easy to crop, because our hair is short. But in my original crop of Teri’s photo, I left her too much hair — which left her with way too little face. No big deal. I went back into the original photo and made a tighter crop. Now her face is approximately the same size as the other contributors.

But that practical example comprises what may be the most important lesson of weblogging (or even of life): If something’s not right, fix it. This is an inherently revisable medium. Changes go down the memory hole, so there is always the peril that someone will change something in order to deceive or occlude. But we gain the corresponding power to chase a convergent series of minor corrections to something that just might blow a kiss at perfection. Most big things are accretions of little things, and, if the little things are right, the big things are that much easier to handle.

It might be Sunday, but I have a homework assignment — for Teri and anyone else who might want to play along. I’m doing a diagnostic interview with Teri to find out where she is on the weblogging ziggurat. Teri’s assignment is to write a BloodhoundBlog post defining what she sees as the challenges facing her as a new real estate weblogger, detailing her desired end goal from real estate weblogging and offering some ideas of how we might get from one to the other. This is really just a writing assignment, so no one should feel too constrained. If you’re playing along at home, you can post as a comment to this post or do something on Active Rain or on your own weblog.

Here’s a hint for Teri or anyone who wants a gold star on their essay: Revise yourself to within hailing distance of perfection. On the other hand, don’t kill yourself. Aim for the best work you can do in an hour. Why? If you’re spending hours trying to Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Last week, I wrote about my objections to webloggers being regarded as “the press”. My post was interesting, I hope, but the comments were fascinating (by which device I commend you thither).

But wait. There’s more. An important reason not to regard — or to affect to regard — webloggers as “the press,” is simply that the transparency of weblogging entails a vigilant oversight of “the press.” They don’t link. We do. There can be valid reasons for not linking — technologically impossible or ossification of writing habits. But again and again mainstream media figures are exposed as having taken tendentious positions, attempting to take advantage of the audience’s relative ignorance. James Taranto has made a career of exposing the self-destructive biases of The New York Times.

Occasionally, a deceptive weblogger will be exposed in the same way — but that’s the point. We live in a world where we expect every assertion of fact to be checked and challenged. For too long they (not all of them, but the worst of them), have lived in a world where they expected to be taken on faith — and where that faith was easily abused. They will be much improved, in time, by mastering our virtues. We have nothing to gain — and everything to lose — by enmiring our reputations in their vices.

And it is important to make the distinction between viewpoint and bias. A point of view is common — all but ubiquitous — among weblogs. We are not all about opinion, as is sometimes charged, but a weblogger’s opinions are never very far from his keyboard — nor should they be. By contrast, bias or tendency is an attempt to sway by underhanded means — by deliberately quoting out of context, for example, or deliberately ignoring a contrary point of view. Ideologues of all stripes shriek about bias in the mainstream media because the mainstream media loudly proclaims itself to be without tendency. It is very easy to discount for a point of view. It is virtually impossibly properly to weigh the influence of a hidden bias.

And still more: There can Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Let’s get the introduction out of the way first, a brand new BloodhoundBlog contributor:

Dayton, Ohio, is the life-long home and territory of Teri Lussier, the newly-minted Realtor become newly-minted real estate weblogger who is Greg Swann’s co-contestant in Active Rain’s Project Blogger.

I didn’t like the Project Blogger logo, so I made one just for us:

I wrote about this real estate weblogging contest nearly a month ago, but it’s taken a while to iron out all the details. You can read all the rules at Active Rain. I’ve already been building stuff as course material for the contest.

And this will continue. A great many very interesting people campaigned to compete with me in this contest. I picked Teri because she was game and fun, and because she was the greenest candidate overall, both as an agent and as a weblogger. But, even though I could only pick one co-contestant, everyone is invited to play along with the BloodhoundBlog team.

How’s that? Because we’re going to conduct the entire contest in public, of course. I’m sure Teri is aghast to discover that she is now a BloodhoundBlog contributor. I didn’t tell her I was planning this. Her charge, going forward, will be to talk to us about the challenges she faces as we build a weblog for her back in Dayton. Meanwhile, I cannot keep my own trap shut, so you can figure pretty much everything will get blogged about by one or both of us.

I don’t care if we win. Cathy will just give the prize money to indignant cats. But I do care that we do this job properly. Teri is her own person, and there is only so much I can teach her. But I will endeavor to teach her — and you — everything I know about real estate weblogging.
< ?php include ("REWL101.php"); ?>

Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing