Category: Blogging (page 21 of 84)

March 8, 2008

The Wile E. Coyote School of Mosquito Extermination — and why you need to put a condom on your trusting nature

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

That headline is lousy for Googlization, but it got your attention, didn’t it?

First, Russell Shaw unearthed an ugly little bug in WordPress that permits malware mechanics to hi-jack certain features of a weblog. If that sounds vague, you bet it is. I’m not going to tell you what happens, where, or how. It is sufficient to say that the exploit is possible in any currently-running hosted version of WordPress. Why did we get hit? Despite the scare stories in the newspapers, malware is almost-always devoted to some kind of quasi-legitimate commerce. Basically, the bug that bit us was trying to use our hosting and our traffic to conduct its business at our expense.

Not cool.

The exploit is recurrent. I can kill any particular instance of it, but since the trapdoor is in WordPress, the only way to keep this little mosquito from coming back is to keep slapping it dead — with the only alternative being to kill WordPress entirely.

Enter cron, the Unix utility that will run any Unix process on the schedule you set. With luck, this exploit will be fixed in WordPress 2.5, which is due to be released shortly. In the meantime, once a minute we’re swatting that mosquito, leaving not so much as a bloodstain. Most of the time, it’s not there, of course. When it is, it has 59 or fewer seconds to suck our blood before it dies again.

That much was easy, but I’ve had plenty of time to watch this little critter in action, and in consequence I’ve learned a ton about malware theory, as it were. So once every 15 minutes, cron is running a different job that combs our whole file server looking for suspicious files. And if anything else pops up, I already know how to kill it and keep on killing it.

All of which leads me to say: I love the Apache web-server technology. Where else can you drop a ton of Acme DDT onto one little mosquito once a minute — like Wile E. Coyote at his most frenzied — without even breaking a sweat?

Alright, that’s the first thing. Here’s Read more

March 8, 2008

Kevin Kelly will teach you everything he knows about the economics of abundance — for free

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Mike Farmer is the gift that keeps on giving. Last night at his place, and today at our place, he takes us deep inside the mind of Kevin Kelly.

I’ve been catching notices of Kelly’s name in the tech blogs, but I haven’t made time to read him. Big mistake on my part, corrected at some length this morning.

Kelly’s 1,000 True Fans forms the basis for a survival manual for exemplary-service Realtors and lenders.

His Technology Wants To Be Free is a much deeper discussion of the “free” economy than the Chris Anderson essay I talked about last week.

I may go into greater detail later, but you don’t need to be bottle fed. Get yourself to the Technium and drink from the fire-hose.

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

March 7, 2008

Do you want to know the best Black Pearl of all? When someone offers you a valuable jewel, show up to collect your prize!

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

During the ProjectBlogger competition last Spring, I advised the contestants to enter a writing contest Problogger.com was hosting. Of all the apprentices, only Teri Lussier entered, with the result that she finished the competition with a huge number of Technorati links and a Page Rank of 4 — truly astounding results for almost no effort.

Say that again: “Truly astounding results for almost no effort.” That’s like a BloodhoundBlog mantra. That’s everything we’re looking for, the leveraged opportunity that produces the best benefits for the least effort at the lowest cost.

Even so, I knew when I announced the BloodhoundBlog Black Pearl Diver’s contest that few people would enter. The effort was nothing, really, just another blog post. The Grand Prize is a full scholarship to BloodhoundBlog Unchained, but every winning entrant would get a link back to their site on our side-bar. This is possibly the most powerful link in the RE.net. It’s certainly the most powerful link anyone is offering you for free. And we had — count ’em — four entries.

The good news is, they were four great entries. But before we get to them, I’d like to cite three honorable mentions:

Mike Farmer brought us This is not for the contest — just tipping my hat, discussing his plans to create single-property weblogs for his listings.
Teri Lussier took on the entire Social Media Marketing universe with Does the RE.net mean Real Estate or Resist Everything?
And Todd Carpenter knocked my socks off last night with this simple Google search. For now, Todd is dominating the keyword zillow mortgages by sheer blog-power. It will be interesting to see if Zillow is able to take that keyword away from Todd, but, no matter what, he is demonstrating the search-engine leverage of weblogging.

And now… on to the winners:

Kevin Warmath weighs in with If A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words, A Video Must Be Worth a Million, a discussion of his odyssey through visual marketing media for his listings.

Brian Miller offers up “…Vee have our vays. You vill sign zee papers…”, which details how he learned how to get more by demanding less.

Colleen Kulikowski Read more

March 7, 2008

My Real Estate Radio USA debut — and a reminder that the price for BloodhoundBlog Unchained tickets goes up at midnight tonight

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

You can go to Real Estate Radio USA to hear the MP3 of my appearance today. I went into it expecting to kind of goofy and fun, but we actually ended up covering a lot of nuts-and-bolts real estate techniques.

As Brian Brady announced when he made his own appearance on Real Estate Radio USA, the price for BloodhoundBlog Unchained tickets will be going up at midnight tonight. If you want to get the whole package — a $350 value — for the Guerrilla-only special price of $149, you need to make your purchase now.

Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing, real estate training

March 7, 2008

Fred Flintstone speaks: Listen to me today on Real Estate Radio USA

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

As a reminder, I will be on Real Estate Radio USA this afternoon at 2:30 pm MST. I’ll be talking about everything I can remember about BloodhoundBlog Unchained, plus, presumably, a lot of other stuff. I’m full of ideas and light on sleep, so I should be a fun listen. You can snag the MP3 later if you miss the show live.

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

March 6, 2008

No more web sites in the remarks section? ARMLS drops the hammer on the one little bit of the 21st century it was getting right

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

I read about the outlawing of web site URLs in listings on the “Welcome to Tempo” page of the Arizona Regional Multiple Listings Services (ARMLS), but I wasn’t certain it meant what it seemed to mean. Since I have been a Realtor, we have promoted our single-property websites in the remarks section of the listing, as have many other agents. It seemed odd to me, given how anal ARMLS had been about contact information in virtual tours, but I thought it was a laudable concession to real life in the third millennium.

We talk in web sites — Bloodhound Realty does, particularly. We live in webbed-wide world. This is news to no one. The appropriate way to talk about houses is in web sites. Hurray for ARMLS! It doesn’t really “get it,” but it gets at least some of it.

Not so.

Comes today this email:

Thursday, March 06, 2008

Gregory Swann ABR CRS GRI,

Our new iCheck program identified the following Error. The Error and any related verbiage was removed on Thursday, March 6, 2008.

MLS#: 0000000 TEMPORARILY OFF MARKET/RES
Error: MLS Rule Error (000)
Description: Prohibited URL

No further action is required by you at this time.

Thank you for complying with the ARMLS Rules and Regulations.

I know, I know, you don’t have to tell me. I understand, I just don’t approve.

First, this is an artifact of the co-broke, the archaic practice of buyer’s representatives being paid by the listing agent. If commissions were divorced, all of the Top Secrets of the MLS system — every one of which is a violation of the buyer’s agent’s fiduciary duty to put the buyer’s interests ahead of all others (which most certainly includes the seller and the listing agent) — would be swept away like the dusty relics of the anti-capitalist era that they are.

Second, the specific purpose of forbidding web site URLs in listings is to impose an artificial chokepoint on the free market. Buyer’s agent’s seek to hold their own clients hostage in the transaction. In order to secure their own compensation, they will withhold the fact of Read more

March 5, 2008

Apprehending Realtor 2.0: Seven essential skills of the 21st century real estate agent . . .

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

[Russell Shaw taught a symposium today in Phoenix on Geographic Farming. Cathy and I were there, and Russell was sweet enough to give a plug to BloodhoundBlog Unchained. At the break, I was swarmed by people wanting more information on Social Media Marketing, especially weblogging — most regretting that they hadn’t gotten started sooner. Teri Lussier is a scorching read on those same kind of ideas today. Both events put me in mind of this post, which I wrote on July 23, 2006 — a Sunday — I can remember the day. This is flagship content for BloodhoundBlog, one of the posts that established who we are, our steady position in this discussion. But it’s amazing to me how timeless this advice has turned out to be — how much we are all still “situated at various points from painfully awful to Insanely Great on the continua for each one of these skill sets.” This one is worth studying — and worth pursuing the links. –GSS, 03/05/08]

People leaving comments at BloodhoundBlog keep confusing Cathleen Collins for me, so I decided to steal an idea from Rain City Guide and put our photos beside each of our posts. That entailed revising BloodhoundBlog’s weblog template, of course, which also meant adapting its Cascading Style Sheet. A significant number of people reading this already don’t know what I’m talking about, so I’ll endeavor to lose most of the rest: I had to rewrite a few little bits of PHP to make everything work.

Like this:

That puts the pictures, which I had prepared in Photoshop, in place. This code:

is the actual name of the photo. That dumb little bit of PHP says, “Get the ID number of the current author and replace everything from the < to the > with that number. The photos are named 1.jpg, 2.jpg, etc., so the PHP substitution makes the right photo show up for the right author.

PHP is an amazingly robust and incredibly loose language, but the amount and kind of PHP you use to manage a WordPress weblog is minor and very simple — baby-steps PHP.

But this occurred to Read more

March 5, 2008

Tick tock: Time marches on at a Bloodhound’s lanky pace

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Just a reminder: The deadline for the BloodhoundBlog Black Pearl Diver’s contest is tonight at midnight.

Also: I will be on Real Estate Radio USA this Friday at 2:30 pm MST. I think that means 1:30/2:30/3:30/4:30 pm, west to east, but you might check my math. If you miss it, their shows are always available as MP3s soon afterward.

Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing

March 4, 2008

Oh, for goodness’ sakes! Nothing sells houses like houses, so of course you should blog listings — your own and other Realtors’

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Very early on in BloodhoundBlog’s history, I argued against blogging listings. The argument actually concerned styles of anti-blogging that were common then: Stealing and reposting newspaper articles verbatim, for example, or posting listing after listing with nothing to engage the reader in any way.

Later on, when I was working on the posts that became Real Estate Weblogging 101, I reversed that position in a big way:

So what are we looking for? Hmmm… There’s no place like it, and, when you go there, they have to take you in…

We’re looking for home, of course. If I could lay one blanket complaint against locally-oriented real estate weblogs — allowing for particular exceptions — it’s that they are way too much locale-oriented and way too little focused on — what? — on homes and families.

Russell Shaw is beyond brilliant, and BloodhoundBlog is very lucky to have him as a contributor. But if no one learns anything else from Russell, please read, learn, mark and inwardly digest this sliver of his genius: Buyers don’t want agents, they want a house.

The very first thing I want to see at your neighborhood/community/town-focused real estate weblog is a house. A nice, big, homey house, with a welcoming front door. I want to see a gleeful little girl on a swing-set and a Chocolate Labrador playing Frisbee with her brother. I want to see the Spring flowers and the Autumn foliage and the glowing of Christmas candles — all at the same time. I know you can’t do all that, but I want to feel that way anyway.

I want for you to have made me feel instantly at home.

At a minimum, that means adapting the stock weblog theme you’ve adopted. Okayfine. Get on it or hire it out. First impressions are lasting. If you don’t sell me on the idea that there is no place like your home on the web, I’m movin’ on. Buyers don’t want agents, they want a house.

In truth, I think your target market should be sellers, not buyers, but it’s going to be people with their buyer’s hat on — even if they need Read more

March 4, 2008

The All-Spin Zone: The big news from the Inman News relaunch is that much of the RE.net is now in bed with Brad Inman

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

I had mail from a vendor just lately asking me if I might be interested in a forthcoming story. This was my reply:

Just so as not to disappoint, this is the way we work:

Good for consumers, agents or lenders, we eat it up.

Good for the vendor, we ignore it.

I should think this would be obvious, but much of the RE.net has gone into pure PR mode — more high-fives than your kid’s soccer match — so I just wanted to be clear.

As evidence of this phenomenon, witness the fawning coverage for Inman News’ relaunch this weekend. For all the hype, what actually happened was that they moved the furniture, and gave everything a coat of paint — hardly earth-shaking events.

Interestingly, it’s still a for-pay site, but, as far as I can tell, the “news” is now free. Here’s an unencrypted telegram from Secret Agent Slobbering Dog to Brad Inman: Regulating access to the news was the chokepoint. No one should pay for ordinary information — mostly regurgitated vendor press releases, just like Realtor magazine. But no sane person has any reason to pay a hundred-and-fifty bucks a year for an official Inman News sippee cup.

Of course, while everyone else was fawning over that boffo furniture-moving job, we were talking about strangling the last of the chokepoints in the twenty-first century marketplace. Oddly enough, we have the idea that what is important is what is important to you — not to the people we have drinks with — or hope someday to have drinks with.

My take is that people can crave affection or admiration or companionship entirely too much. The same goes for prestige. What makes real weblogging work — and what makes most corporate or commercial or vendor blogging fail — comes down to spin, juice, PR. You either shun it or you embrace it, and there really isn’t any middle ground. It’s a nice thing that Inman News did a little sweeping up. But that ain’t news.

On the other hand, there is ample room in these events to draw inferences. BloodhoundBlog has nothing to gain or lose. I set it Read more

March 3, 2008

The Odysseus Medal: “Free has emerged as a full-fledged economy”

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

I’m sorry to keep going outside the RE.net for the Odysseus Medal competition, but that’s where the news is right now. Inside the RahRah.net, present company excepted, everything seems to be devoted to mutual back-slapping — which would be boring even if it were warranted. In any case, The Odysseus Medal this week goes to Chris Anderson for Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business:

Thanks to Gillette, the idea that you can make money by giving something away is no longer radical. But until recently, practically everything “free” was really just the result of what economists would call a cross-subsidy: You’d get one thing free if you bought another, or you’d get a product free only if you paid for a service.

Over the past decade, however, a different sort of free has emerged. The new model is based not on cross-subsidies — the shifting of costs from one product to another — but on the fact that the cost of products themselves is falling fast. It’s as if the price of steel had dropped so close to zero that King Gillette could give away both razor and blade, and make his money on something else entirely. (Shaving cream?)

You know this freaky land of free as the Web. A decade and a half into the great online experiment, the last debates over free versus pay online are ending. In 2007 The New York Times went free; this year, so will much of The Wall Street Journal. (The remaining fee-based parts, new owner Rupert Murdoch announced, will be “really special … and, sorry to tell you, probably more expensive.” This calls to mind one version of Stewart Brand’s original aphorism from 1984: “Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive … That tension will not go away.”)

Once a marketing gimmick, free has emerged as a full-fledged economy. Offering free music proved successful for Radiohead, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, and a swarm of other bands on MySpace that grasped the audience-building merits of zero. The fastest-growing parts of the gaming industry are ad-supported casual games online and free-to-try Read more

March 3, 2008

Dress up that custom weblog you’ve built to help sell your home

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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

Dress up that custom weblog you’ve built to help sell your home

Last week we built a custom weblog to help you sell your home. This week, let’s dress it up a little.

Some of the things I’ll be talking about are free, but others cost money. Your Realtor may have a marketing budget, so that could be a source of funding. But even if not, with only a few buyers chasing a very large number of homes, stinting on marketing costs may not be your best strategy.

Here’s something you can do for free: Go to Google Maps and build a map to your home. At a minimum, you should also provide driving directions from the nearest freeway exit. But, if you sign up for a free Google account, you can link to an elaborate custom map for your home.

Highlight parks, playgrounds, schools and shopping. Saying anything at all about churches might invite Fair Housing complaints, but you can draw attention to other nearby amenities. Even better, you can attach pictures and internet links to your map markers, so that buyers can really get a feel for the neighborhood.

Online real estate sites like Zillow.com and Trulia.com want to know that your home is for sale. You can add photos to those sites and link back to your custom weblog, which will bring you more traffic. On Zillow.com, you can “claim” your home, updating details on any upgrades you have made to it.

We like to use floorplans. You might be able to get one to scan (or better yet, an Adobe PDF file) from your home’s builder. We use a company called FloorPlansFirst.com because they make interactive web-based floorplans. Buyers can move their furniture into the home to see how it will fit. This costs money, but it sells houses.

For virtual tours, we’re switching to Obeo.com. Their tours cost more, but they offer a category-killer feature: Virtual redecorating. Your buyers can discover how much they’re going to love your house after they’ve remodeled the kitchen and repainted the exterior.

And the only stronger Read more

March 3, 2008

Hate Twitter ? Become A Media Mogul With It

by Brian Brady

Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL

I’m talking to Teri Lussier about Twitter, a lot. I didn’t get it until I decided to post relevant mortgage market information on the Twitter feed. Let’s assume you HATE Twitter (or just don’t get it). Let’s assume that you don’t have the time to Tweet.

Q: How can your business benefit by using Twitter?

A: Eyeballs- Be the destination place.

Think of Twitter as the television airwaves, twitter streams as “TV channels”, and your blog or website as the cable company. If you can host multiple channels (Twitter streams) on your website/blog, you win eyeballs. More importantly, you win loyalty as the destination place for real-time, user-generated information.

I’m starting an experiment, for Andy Kaufman to analyze, in his Twitter presentation at our upcoming Unchained conference. I’ll be asking input from Andy and Teri Lussier as I try this idea. The goal is to drive more traffic to my web log and become an information destination for potential customers;

I want to be San Diego’s Twitter Cable Company. Here’s my plan:

1- Create a landing page for my web log (www.TwitDiego.com) with a “channel guide” for Twitter streams,

2- Evangelize the utility of Twitter as an information tool to relatively low-tech users. The Saint James Academy Parents (and faculty), The Lomas Santa Fe Country Club, The Villanova Alumni in San Diego, Pacific Beach nightlife, Gaslamp nightlife, North County restaurant reviews, The San Diego State University, RealEstate.com agents, etc, etc.

3- Offer streams or “channels” to each user group.

4- Market www.TwitDiego.com to everyone I meet. I did this yesterday, at the beach, to a soccer mom. She’s setting up a Twitter account and accepted my offer of a webinar for the soccer moms.

Sit back and watch my mortgagereport profile on Twitter get more followers, my web log get more traffic, and my community grow.

This is a wild hare idea. All CONSTRUCTIVE comments or suggestions are welcome.

March 3, 2008

Bloodhound Lit: The art, science and business of writing interesting and profitable real estate weblog posts

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

By his good example, Kevin Warmath reminds you to get busy on your BloodhoundBlog Black Pearl Diver’s contest entry. We’re about to talk about writing, so let me remind you that I wrote a post on how to write a Black Pearl Diver’s contest entry that advances your interests — and that one post is a virtual how-to on producing profitable real estate weblogging content. If you were to write nothing but mix-and-match variations on that one post format, you could produce a killer blog — interesting to read, very attractive to search engines and a reliable generator of new business.

We have written a lot about writing. The truth is, we have written a lot about everything, but weblogging is a self-referential art form. Blogging about blogging is baked in the cake. The subject comes to my mind now because we were linked last week from the Guardian Unlimited, the web site of the Daily Guardian newspaper in London.

Why them? Why us? They were linking to a preface to a Joseph Conrad novel that I had posted as both a discussion of effective writing and as a thrilling demonstration of Conrad’s premises in action. We Google up first on Conrad’s text, which is how the Guardian found us. And that preface is truly exemplary writing advice, a breathtaking tour de force that is its own best proof of its arguments.

A few days later, I put up my own frail defense of those same arguments:

This is what Conrad was talking about, writing to the senses, writing actions and events that feel to the reader like actual experience.

The point is to think in active, expressive verbs, and particular — granular — nouns and adjectives, using images and metaphors to connect ideas. To write not as discourse but as exposition — the creation of that fascinating dream-like state of hyper-reality in the reader’s mind.

There is a sense in which this is about writing as art, but the other way of looking at things is to see all works of the minds as expressions of the artist within. Sometimes a grocery list is just a Read more

March 2, 2008

Day of the Long Tail: How broadcasting lost its chokepoint

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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:

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.
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.
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

Category: Blogging (page 21 of 84)

The Wile E. Coyote School of Mosquito Extermination — and why you need to put a condom on your trusting nature

by Greg Swann

Kevin Kelly will teach you everything he knows about the economics of abundance — for free

by Greg Swann

Do you want to know the best Black Pearl of all? When someone offers you a valuable jewel, show up to collect your prize!

by Greg Swann

My Real Estate Radio USA debut — and a reminder that the price for BloodhoundBlog Unchained tickets goes up at midnight tonight

by Greg Swann

Fred Flintstone speaks: Listen to me today on Real Estate Radio USA

by Greg Swann

No more web sites in the remarks section? ARMLS drops the hammer on the one little bit of the 21st century it was getting right

by Greg Swann

Apprehending Realtor 2.0: Seven essential skills of the 21st century real estate agent . . .

by Greg Swann

Tick tock: Time marches on at a Bloodhound’s lanky pace

by Greg Swann

Oh, for goodness’ sakes! Nothing sells houses like houses, so of course you should blog listings — your own and other Realtors’

by Greg Swann

The All-Spin Zone: The big news from the Inman News relaunch is that much of the RE.net is now in bed with Brad Inman

by Greg Swann

The Odysseus Medal: “Free has emerged as a full-fledged economy”

by Greg Swann

Dress up that custom weblog you’ve built to help sell your home

by Greg Swann

Hate Twitter ? Become A Media Mogul With It

by Brian Brady

Bloodhound Lit: The art, science and business of writing interesting and profitable real estate weblog posts

by Greg Swann

Day of the Long Tail: How broadcasting lost its chokepoint

by Greg Swann

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