BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Author: Greg Swann (page 83 of 209)

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

December 12, 2008

If the question is, “What should a Bloodhound do if awarded the Pulitzer Prize?” — the answer is, “Drool…”

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Fanmail from some flounder:

BloodhoundBlog: Will Pulitzer Come Calling?

The BloodhoundBlog is a phenomenon; read it and you’ll become addicted to the prose, the passion, and the gem-like jewels of news. It now has a cult following and it has achieved pinnacles of success in online media. But will Pulitzer’s new criteria open the door to the likes of the “dawg??”

More here on the Pulitzers.

It is obvious by now that the best writing in the world is being written for electronic media only. Excepting Geno, we wouldn’t qualify for any awards anyway, but it remains that the Pulitzer committee is not quite ready to tiptoe the whole way into the twenty-first century. It is stretching itself only so far as to consider prose that is being committed to pretend paper. If you can hang in cyberspace without clinging in craven desperation to atoms — even purely imaginary atoms — your talents will not be considered. The Pulitzer Prize will remain a celebration of obsolescent relics by irrelevant antiques. Sic semper tyrannosauris.

December 11, 2008

BloodhoundBlog.net can map domains: Your free real estate weblog can look just like you’re hosting it yourself

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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It took some time to work out all the kinks, but we’ve got domain-mapping working on BloodhoundBlog.net.

What does that mean?

You can set up a free BloodhoundBlog.net weblog, say, something like myblog.BloodhoundBlog.net.

Then you can go to a domain registrar like Godaddy.com and register your own domain, perhaps MyOwnDomain.com. You don’t have to buy a hosting package or anything else, just the domain.

Then, with a little help from us, you can set up MyOwnDomain.com so that it displays myblog.BloodhoundBlog.net.

From the point of view of both your users and search engine spiders, your weblog is hosted at MyOwnDomain.com.

Here’s an example, a melancholy celebration of Dayton by Teri Lussier. The blog is built on BloodhoundBlog.net, but, because of domain-mapping, it looks like it lives on its own server.

WordPress.com charges $10 a year for domain-mapping. We’ll do it for free — with the stipulation that you really are a hard-working real estate blogger. If you’re really pounding out the content, we can help you customize your blog’s theme, too.

Between money work, web work and WordPress work, I’m coming and going, but we have a lot of cool announcements coming up. Stay tuned…

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December 11, 2008

“The world’s largest country is well along the way to forming an intellectual elite on a scale that the world has never seen…”

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The Asia Times:

America outspends China on defense by a margin of more than six to one, the Pentagon estimates. In another strategic dimension, though, China already holds a six-to-one advantage over the United States. Thirty-six million Chinese children study piano today, compared to only 6 million in the United States. The numbers understate the difference, for musical study in China is more demanding.

It must be a conspiracy. Chinese parents are selling plasma-screen TVs to America, and saving their wages to buy their kids pianos – making American kids stupider and Chinese kids smarter. Watch out, Americans – a generation from now, your kid is going to fetch coffee for a Chinese boss. That is a bit of an exaggeration, of course – some of the bosses will be Indian. Americans really, really don’t have a clue what is coming down the pike. The present shift in intellectual capital in favor of the East has no precedent in world history.

“Chinese parents urge their children to excel at instrumental music with the same ferocity that American parents [urge] theirs to perform well in soccer or Little League,” wrote Jennifer Lin in the Philadelphia Inquirer June 8 in an article entitled China’s ‘piano fever’.

The world’s largest country is well along the way to forming an intellectual elite on a scale that the world has never seen, and against which nothing in today’s world – surely not the inbred products of the Ivy League puppy mills – can compete. Few of its piano students will earn a living at the keyboard, to be sure, but many of the 36 million will become much better scientists, engineers, physicians, businessmen and military officers.

More:

Any activity that requires discipline and deferred gratification benefits children, but classical music does more than sports or crafts. Playing tennis at a high level requires great concentration, but nothing like the concentration required to perform the major repertoire of classical music. Perhaps the only pursuit with comparable benefits is the study of classical languages. It is not just concentration as such, but its content that makes classical music such a formative tool. Music, contrary Read more

December 9, 2008

Marketing the praxis of a Scenius thoughtfully: How can we use dynamism and triangulation to play tunes that make the spiders dance?

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Teri Lussier paid me a very high compliment today in email, although I’m sure that’s wasn’t her intent. I expect she was just being matter-of-fact. Here’s what she said:

You don’t do anything without a purpose.

She was asking why I phrase so many headlines in the form of a question, assuming correctly that I do so for marketing reasons. Questions are a pretty common arrow in the copywriter’s quiver. Properly constructed, they are inherently interesting and instantly involving. I’m not as good at this as I plan to be, but one of things I’m looking for in a good question is something that incites at least as much curiosity as it satisfies. I give you the headline of this post as an example.

But Teri’s off-hand remark — “You don’t do anything without a purpose” — means everything to me, because it’s a completely true statement about everything I do — and everything I’ve ever wanted to be. I can’t promise you that I always know what I’m doing, but I always know with perfect certainty what it is I intend to be doing — what objective I hope to achieve by my efforts.

So we’ve been playing this scenius game since Thanksgiving, really since Swallow Hill Road, and it’s fun to explore how much we understand of what we’re doing, and, fun, too, to understand how much there is that we’ve never thought to explore.

Both Cheryl Johnson and I have been rebuilding our “Current Listings” content as Scenius scenes. Why? Because a content management system like a weblog is the perfect way of organizing frequently-edited copy — provide that you have some way of delivering the content in a form you can stand, once you’ve edited it. This is what Scenius — the software praxis, not the social process — is all about.

Stop.

A scenius — lower case — is a metaphor for a kind of communal genius. The word comes from “scene” plus “genius”, and the best example of a scenius that I can offer is the birth of Bebop jazz. When you put smart, well-informed, passionate people together, the synergy of their Read more

December 9, 2008

The Scenius.net scenes reader can tell if you’re working at your desktop web browser or on your iPhone…

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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…and switch Cascading Style Sheets intelligently. What it needs are more shared scenes.

Making a shared Scenius scene is work. Not a lot, but some. What do you get in return:

  • Added-value content for your blog and for any blog that echoes your scene
  • A quick way to promote news or ideas you think are important without writing full blog posts
  • By your links, you draw attention to your blog from other blogs in your content sphere
  • Your scene links back to your blog, so the more it echoes, the better for your SEO posture
  • When other blogs echo your shared scene, they are exposing your blog to their readers, which can lead to new readers — or new business

Your weblog put you into the narrowcasting business, and that’s a great thing. Building a shared Scenius scene will put you into the broadcasting business, a boon that gains in benefits — for everyone — the more it echoes.

What’s in it for me? With each scene, I’m taking a link back to BloodhoundBlog — a non-monetized weblog. In other words, I’m working for free, which is not at all unusual. You live in a world infested with sleazoid vendors, each one of whom wants to nick you for monthly fees for work you can easily do yourself. I will show you — for free — how to build yourself a broadcast platform that will benefit everyone involved, yourself the most.

There are a few people working (behind the scenes as it were) on shared Scenes that will debut in the next few days. This is a bandwagon worth jumping on. Good for your readers. Good for the writers you feature. Good for the blogs echoing your shared scenes — and good for their readers. And good for you.

Review the terms and conditions and let me know when you’re ready to get started on your own shared Scenius scene.

December 6, 2008

Making the Scenius scene: I’m prepared to share an entirely new style of blogging with you — but you have to hold up your end

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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I wrote last week about the Scenius blogs we’ve been playing with. The concepts we’ve developed constitute a new style of blogging, a hybrid of the best features of link-blogging and RSS feeds with much better control and with none of the defects.

A Scenius blog called “Switched-On Marketing” is riding in our sidebar, along with some other real estate blogs. I have another one called “Phoenix Area Headlines” running on our client-focused real estate weblogs.

That last sentence is important: I maintain one Scenius blog for “Phoenix Area Headlines”, but I can echo it wherever I want it to appear. And it comes in like a blog, not like a feed or a widget, with full control over the appearance and with all the links behaving as expected.

Why is that important? Because I now have a reliable source of keyword-rich dynamic content that I can share with other Phoenix-area weblogs. Other Phoenix real estate webloggers are free to use it, but I’m much more interested in hanging around the sidebars of weblogs run by my clients or future clients.

The “Phoenix Area Headlines” Scenius blog is composed of content that will be interesting to readers of any weblog in the Phoenix area. It’s a regularly-updated supply of new content for any weblog that hosts it.

The “Phoenix Area Headlines” Scenius blog is rich in keywords that will cause the blogs that host it to score well with search engines. I’m giving my neighbors content and also boosting their SEO.

The “Phoenix Area Headlines” Scenius blog consists of highly dynamic content. There are new posts every day, and old posts scroll off the bottom every day. What this means is that search engines will see new unique content on every page they spider, every time they spider, if those pages are echoing my Scenius blog.

And the “Phoenix Area Headlines” Scenius blog links back to BloodhoundRealty.com. I’m using sweat equity to buy a place on your sidebar. Your readers win, you win, I win — everybody wins.

The “Switched-On Marketing” Scenius blog does the same sorts of jobs for real estate and marketing weblogs: I give you interesting Read more

December 6, 2008

Seriously, who’s a better risk for a mortgage than someone who has already lost a home to foreclosure?

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This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link).

 
Seriously, who’s a better risk for a mortgage than someone who has already lost a home to foreclosure?

We talked last week about credit flexibility among merchants as they try to find ways around the banking crunch. The flip side of the same coin is how the credit marketplace will react, going forward, to home foreclosures.

You’ve heard all your life that a foreclosure is second only to a bankruptcy in the way it will ruin your credit. This is still true, but “ruin” may turn out to be an adjustable calamity.

Here’s why: A lot of people are going through foreclosure. Ninety percent or more of homeowners are unaffected by the wave of bank repossessions, but that still leaves millions of people who are going to have a foreclosure on their credit for the next seven years.

What’s going to happen to those folks when they go to the furniture store or the jewelry store or the car dealership? They might end up paying a higher interest rate, but they’re still going to get financing.

I have been advising my investor clients for months to ignore recent foreclosures on credit reports. Past performance on every other sort of credit account matters a lot. But if landlords refuse to rent to folks who have lost their homes, they will be turning away half or more of the tenant population.

My take is that, right now, a recent foreclosure is like hospital debt: If everyone else was getting paid before, during and after the financial catastrophe, you just have to look past the elephant in the room.

And here’s the funny part: I am sure this will apply to home loans in due course, also. If mortgage money remains freely available, lenders will find a way to overlook recent foreclosures in order to underwrite new home loans.

We can hope that, this time, interest rates will reflect the true risk lenders are taking on. But this country runs on credit. Just because a borrower recently defaulted on a six-figure debt, that’s no reason to withhold the unlimited boon Read more

December 5, 2008

Speaking in tongues: Revising my universal contact form for real estate weblogs — e-paging support and friendlier coding

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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About eleven months ago, I built a universal contact form for real estate webloggers. Just lately, I’ve revisited that code to add support for e-paging and other kinds of hyper-brief email-based messaging. Getting a form emailed to the office is a nice thing — unless you’re out previewing or inspecting all day. The new version will find you wherever you are.

The revised contact form will email you your prospect’s contact information (to as many email addresses as you like) and, also, optionally e-page you with a very brief form of the information (again transmitting to as many e-page addresses as you choose).

The e-page will give you the party’s name, email address and phone number (the latter two are clickable if your phone supports this function), along with as much of the message as will transmit. The form imposes brevity, so you should be able to puzzle out what is wanted. Everything in the e-page is sent in the briefest practical form to maximize the amount of space left for the message.

Nothing has changed in the form of the user interface — and the UI should inherit its appearance from your CSS specification. But I’ve changed the way the software works internally and the way it installs, both to make it easier to deploy and to avoid conflicts with your ISP’s tech support team.

This contact form is built for WordPress.org weblogs only. It might work in other blogging platforms — and it will certainly work in any static PHP page — but that’s not what we’re talking about right now. You can install the contact form in your sidebar, provided you know how to edit the theme file called sidebar.php. If you have a PHP plug-in installed in your weblog, you can install the form on a WordPress Page, perhaps adding a “Contact Me” button on your sidebar.

Nota bene: There can only be one “Submit” button per page in HTML, so, if you install the contact form on your sidebar, your search button is no longer going to work. If you have to kick something off the sidebar and onto a WordPress Read more

December 4, 2008

Unlocking the scenius of BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix, a hands-on, step-by-step, learn-by-doing guerrilla marketing boot camp

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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This came in by email, but I’m answering it publicly because I expect the question is fairly common:

I am a member of the Cyberprofessionals group. I was unable to attend the session in Orlando and therefore missed your presentation. I have read the materials about the upcoming event in Phoenix and I’m not entirely sure what it’s all about. From what I can see it’s going to be about blogging, and that’s great, but I have perhaps a more broad interest in social networking as well. I know some of the people involved may be experts in that. Could you give me some idea as to the time that is going to be devoted to each of the subject matters.

For a start, let me say that everything I’m saying right now is subject to change. We have some of this ironed out in detail, but much is still to be determined. Moreover, we’re pretty flexible in the way we think. The world we live in upends itself entirely every 15 months or so, and we’re always prepared to turn on a dime. Even so, BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix is going to break out something like this:

First, as I’ve said, the event is going to be a hands-on, step-by-step, learn-by-doing guerrilla marketing boot camp. Our students will be with us for 72 hours total, and out of that time, we could end up working 54 or more hours. We are going to take on every aspect of your marketing praxis, and we’re going to rebuild as much of it as we can in our time together. If you do the prep work your instructors are going to recommend, and if you come to Phoenix prepared to work, you’ll fly home exhausted but with a completely overhauled marketing profile — online, in the social graph, in print and face-to-face.

That’s ambitious, but we can pull it off because we intend to work like no other marketing conference you’ve ever been to or heard about. You are literally going to do the actual work you are learning about — as you learn about it. It Read more

December 3, 2008

BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix will be a hands-on overhaul of your online and offline marketing – enroll now to be sure you get a seat

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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We’ve got the dates for BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix: April 28th to May 1st, 2009.

We’ve got the location: The Radisson Phoenix Airport Hotel North, 427 North 44th St, Phoenix, AZ 85008.

And we’ve got the game plan: A three-day Guerilla Marketing Boot Camp during which you’re going to completely revise your marketing profile — in class. We’re not going to tell you how we work. We’re not going to show you how we work. We’re going to work with you, hands-on, step-by-step as we overhaul your marketing strategy from the ground up.

What are we missing? You. Skip ahead if you’re ready to register for the most intense real estate marketing conference you will ever attend.

Got questions? Here are some BloodhoundBlog posts discussing Unchained in Orlando and anticipating the scenius to come in Phoenix:

Want to know even more? Why not. We’re in the marketing business, after all.

Who should come to BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix? If it’s part of your job to attract and convert new business, we have what you need. On BloodhoundBlog, we talk a lot about Social Media Marketing, but in our own businesses, we work with Social Media Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing, Direct Marketing and good old-fashioned belly-to-belly sales. We also work directly with internet-based tools from PHP to RSS to CSS — acronym soup.

Why should you come? We’ll be going through every bit of this at BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix. Not lecturing as you race to keep up in your notes, but actually doing the work, hands-on, on your own marketing materials.

How will you benefit? Not only will you completely overhaul your existing marketing profile, you’ll learn how Read more

November 30, 2008

“Privacy is an artifact of inefficiency”

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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I say that just about every time I speak in public, and people always ask me to repeat it, and they inscribe it carefully into their notes.

It’s a simple enough idea: What you’ve thought of all your life as privacy has simply been a function of inefficient data processing tools. The more efficacious the means of acquiring and storing data become, the less privacy — unintentional ignorance by others of observable facts — you will have.

If you find this idea repellent — dang…

It is what it is, and it’s absurd to rebel against it. We are real, physical entities. Our purposive actions sometimes have secondary physical consequences that are potentially observable to other people — and to data acquisition devices. Your best hope of achieving privacy, going forward, is to expire. Short of that, you might try to exist in some sort of extra-physical way. And short of that, you might try doing everything you do where no one — and nothing — else can observe you. And short of all that, swallow hard and prepare to have every fact of your life known, at least potentially, by anyone or everyone else.

This does not bother me at all. I deliberately lead a hugely public life. I’m not showy, I hope, but I never want for someone to be able to say something truthful about me that I have not said first myself. I try to lead a very moral life, but no one is perfect. But what I don’t want, ever, is to give the impression that I am trying to hide my imperfections. (Disclosure: I caused a car accident earlier this evening. No one was hurt, but the front end of my car was smacked up pretty good.)

(People who send me email will have grown used to me replying with multiple names in the CC line. I’m never trying to hide facts about my life, but, I am normally trying very hard to not-hide those facts.)

Another thing I say in speeches is that the world is becoming more and more the realm I would have imagined for myself. Mostly the Read more

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Inventing Real Estate 2.0

Welcome to BloodhoundBlog, the national real estate industry marketing and technology weblog written by, for and about real estate professionals. Better yet, welcome to the wired world of real estate. We are busily inventing Real Estate 2.0 – technology, marketing, service and salesmanship. Like all Bloodhounds, we are smart, frisky and fiercely independent. We've built a spot on the earth – beloved over all – where each one of us can be who we are, no matter who that might be. We are committed to an idea of excellence that will flush the bums, the con-men and the crybabies out of the real estate industry. If you yearn to have your failures excused, your moral lapses absolved or your boo-boos kissed, seek elsewhere. But if you are sick to death of mediocrity – welcome home. Read all about us, subscribe to our feed and steel yourself for the hunt. We work hard, we play hard, we learn everything we can – and we bow to no one.

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