BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Blogging (page 27 of 84)

January 14, 2008

The Odysseus Medal: “What Zillow has done is build a business model designed to work from the ground up, a MySpace for your home…”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The Odysseus Medal this week goes to Kris Berg for Zillow news: Upside-down and dumb like a fox:

Transparency is not just a buzz word anymore but expected, even demanded, by the consumer. The consumer wants information, lots of it, and they want honesty and full-disclosure in its delivery.

In Zillow’s case, the consumer is both the real estate agent and the homeowner (which makes for one crazy-big target market), and Zillow needs two things to succeed. They need data, sales and “for-sale”, and they need eyeballs. You can’t have they latter without the former, but rather than build their reputation and their inventory by taking the more-traveled route, courting the big real estate brokerages, they have reached this point primarily by appealing to the individual agent. It is the individual agent who is online and socially connected – and blogging. Appealing to us makes us happy, which in turn inspires us to write nice things about Zillow.

And, instead of pushing the information to the customer, they have given them ownership. What Zillow has done is build a business model designed to work from the ground up, a MySpace for your home. Rather than cling to yesterday’s antiquated marketing practices wherein the customer was slapped silly with a message and expected to respond, they have recognized what so many are resisting. Zillow is recognizing and capitalizing on a new social culture. The conversation is no longer between the guy with something to sell and the guy who might be buying, top down, but between the buyers themselves, upside-down.

The Black Pearl Award this week goes to Krista Baker with Does Your Advertising Ask Prospects To Do Too Much?:

When you decided you may be interested in someone romantically, you don’t jump from first date to marriage. Instead, you take the time to get to know the other person – what are their likes and dislikes, strengths and weaknesses, goals and fears. If both of you value the relationship, you may consider taking the relationship a step further – to engagement and then marriage – but likely, several months (or years) have passed before the relationship progresses to this Read more

January 13, 2008

A Canadian magazine publisher instructs Loudoun County Tax Assessor Todd Kaufman — and all of us — on the American tradition of Freedom of the Press

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

As you may know, the Canadian Human Rights Commission accidentally read George Orwell’s 1984 backwards. In consequence, it has set itself the task of persecuting Canadian publishers for the crime of having published. Most notably, international gadfly Mark Steyn — along with Macleans magazine — has a date with the Star Chamber.

Ezra Levant, while serving as publisher of the Western Standard in Alberta, published the now-infamous Mohammed cartoons in his magazine. Two fundamentalist Islamists brought a complaint to the Human Right Commission, arguing that Levant’s act of publication was essentially a “hate crime.”

In these videos, you will see portions of Levant’s arguments before the Human Rights Commission — a stirring and passionate defense of the principles undergirding the idea of a free press.

Hannah Arendt taught us all about the banality of evil, and the seeming lack of affect in the functionary who presumes to judge the content of Levant’s character is chilling. But Loudoun County Tax Assessor Todd Kaufman is an exponent of the same sort of banal evil: In preference to disputing words with words, Todd Kaufman chose to try to force Danilo Bogdanovic to retract what he had published by threatening his livelihood.

If you truly don’t understand the principles involved, it were well for you to correct that deficiency before you find yourself in Mr. Levant’s place. He at least has the consolation of knowing why he is in the right.

Much, much more at EzraLevant.com.

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January 13, 2008

The Odysseus Medal competition — Voting for the People’s Choice Award is open

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

A total of 17 entries on the short list this week, out of a long list of 75 posts. Vote for the People’s Choice Award here. You can use the voting interface to see each nominated post, so comparison is easy.

Ahem: Please don’t spam all your friends to come and vote for you. First, what we’re interested in is what is popular among people who would have been voting anyway. And second, I’ll eliminate you for cheating. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

Voting runs through to 12 Noon MST Monday. I’ll announce the winners of this week’s awards soon thereafter.

Here is this week’s short-list of Odysseus Medal nominees:

< ?PHP $AltEntries = array ( "Andy Kaufman -- Cross the Digital Divide Quit Hiding Behind that Computer & Cross the Digital Divide”,
“Brian Brady — Buying Countrywide Buying Countrywide: Why Bank of America is the WRONG Buyer“,
“Dan Green — Loan Officer Attrition Homeowners With \”Orphaned Mortgages\” Pay More Money“,
“Dan Melson — Expert Consultants The Future of Real Estate Agency: Expert Consultants, Not Market Access“,
“Doug Quance — Zillow/NCI Finally – I Have Something To Blog About Zillow“,
“Geno Petro — The Blue Stained Dress The Blue Stained Dress“,
“Jillayne Schlicke — The Future of Countrywide The Future of Countrywide“,
“Jim Cronin — Strong Finish How A Strong Finish Has A Real Estate Blog Article Generating Leads“,
“Joel Burslem — Neighborhood Video Producing a Kick Ass Neighborhood Profile Video“,
“Kris Berg — Dumb like a fox Zillow news: Upside-down and dumb like a fox“,
“Krista Baker — Advertising Demands Does Your Advertising Ask Prospects To Do Too Much?“,
“Mike Mueller — It’s Humans that matter It doesn’t matter“,
“Morgan Brown — Our Conundrum Mortgage Interest Rates and Our Conundrum“,
“Paul Chaney — Data Portability Robert Scoble, data portability’s accidental hero“,
“Robbie Paplin — Trulia-nator Dear Zillow-meisters – Better start makin’ copies of the Trulia-nator“,
“Todd Carpenter — Countrywide Wholesale Will BOA cut Countrywide Wholesale? Good riddance.“,
“Tom Royce — Fear and Loathing Fear and Loathing in Business Media (Retail Real Estate Edition)“,
);
shuffle($AltEntries);

$radioGroup = “”;
$num = count($AltEntries);
for ($i=0; $i< $num; $i++) { $pieces = explode("\t", $AltEntries[$i]); $radioGroup .= "

  • “;
    $radioGroup .= “$pieces[0], “;
    $radioGroup .= “$pieces[1]”;
    }

    echo (“

      $radioGroup

    “)
    ?>

    Deadline for next week’s competition is Sunday at 12 Noon MST. You can nominate your own weblog entry or any post you admire here.

    Technorati Tags: , , Read more

    • January 12, 2008

    A Saturday night toy: Your file server as a linked hierarchy

    by

    Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

    Author website

    I owe more “Speaking in tongues” stuff, but I think I may have bored everyone to tears. This, by pointed contrast, is purely for fun.

    Copy this code:

    <?PHP
$thepath = $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'];
$dir = '*';
if ($Bfolder) $dir = "$Bfolder/*";

foreach (glob($dir, GLOB_ONLYDIR) as $filename)
   {
   if (!$Bfolder) echo ("<BR>");
   ?>
   <a href="<?PHP echo($filename); 
   ?>" target="_blank">
   <?PHP echo($filename); ?></a><BR>
   <?PHP
   $URL = urlencode($filename);
   include ("http://$thepath/windex.php?Bfolder=$URL");
   }
?>

    and paste it into a text file.

    Save the file with the name “windex.php”.

    FTP it into the top level of your file server.

    Then go here:

    http://MyServer.com/windex.php

    substituting the name of your server for “MyServer”, of course.

    What are you seeing? The entire directory tree of your file server expressed as links. Each sub-hierarchy of folders is visually separated by a space, just to make things pretty. Each one of those links will work, opening into a web page if the folder contains an HTML “index” file, or to a Unix like directory representation if not.

    Just a toy, just for fun. I’d explain it to you, but then you’d have to kill me.

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    January 12, 2008

    Two-thirds of BloodhoundBlog’s pages were spidered and indexed this week — 1,900 pages in seven days

    by

    Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

    Author website

    Wanna see something cool?

    Google indexes 2,850 pages for BloodhoundBlog. Out of those, 1,900 have been spidered and reindexed since last Saturday, when I added the scrolling panel of Odysseus Medal long-list nominees.

    That’s two-thirds of everything spidered and reindexed in a span of seven days.

    That little scrolling box is already the best link blog in the RE.net, documenting every post of moment anyone thinks to nominate.

    I am not an SEO, and I am not even all that much in love with SEO as an audience-building strategy. But, even so, the structure of the thing — nearly-continuously varying content in what is pure HTML by the time a spider sees it — seems to be catnip to Google.

    I think I know why this is happening, and I’ll know more soon. But in advance of certainty, I built a similar list for BloodhoundRealty.com, a scrolling catalog of my Arizona Republic columns.

    I’m keeping those in date-order, so the list will only update once a week. But, obviously, that site gets spidered a lot less frequently, anyway.

    As an interlinear note, if you are linked from BloodhoundBlog, your links were spidered a bunch of times this week.

    If you write for BloodhoundBlog, your links were spidered a minimum of 3,800 times. Doesn’t mean the linked pages or sites were also spidered, necessarily, but it can’t hurt.

    Here’s my thinking:

    First, you should put the scrolling list of Odysseus Medal long-list nominees in your sidebar. It’s well-behaved and non-intrusive, fitting neatly into your design scheme. It’s a nice list of very good reading, updated frequently. It’s link-love back to the authors of the nominated posts. And, for now at least, it’s a potent search engine attractant.

    Here is the code to paste into your sidebar:

    <?php
include ("https://bloodhoundrealty.com/BloodhoundBlog/TheLongList.php");
?>

    Second, Cameron will build you something like this, if you want it. For example, you could have a randomized scrolling list of your flagship posts, the content you want to make sure your readers see. That would deep-link back into your own weblog, so it would benefit your audience now, and it should help your search engine performance over the long haul. Let me know if you’re Read more

    January 11, 2008

    Want to get more done in the world of Social Media Marketing? Repurpose your content!

    by

    Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

    Author website

    Like this:

    1. I had sweet fanmail from a would-be man of letters who had found some of my more writerly writing and wanted to tap my mojo. I wrote what I thought was good advice to him — briefly, both because that’s the soul of wit and because I am perpetually short on time. (Note the equation of haste with perpetuity. You can’t learn this stuff in a correspondence course.)
    2. ProBlogger Darren Rowse is hosting a competition to see if people can write good blogging advice in Twitter-length posts. So I cut my writing advice down to 140 characters on the nose and posted an entry.
    3. Yesterday at his Conversation Media and Marketing weblog, Paul Chaney wondered how webloggers produce content that is “Well-written, insightful, practical, providing value to the reader.”
    4. Finally, every day brings news that someone new is following me on Twitter, even though I’ve posted perhaps six times on Twitter since it was introduced at South-by-Southwest almost a year ago.

    Ergo, in one fell swoop — for my young fan who would be better off writing than reading, for the ProBlogger hordes, for Paul Chaney and for the Twitterpated — four birds with one stone:

    Writers write. You’ll get better by writing, not by doubting yourself. We all miss perfection. It’s the aiming for it that makes us better.

    It only looks easy…

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    January 10, 2008

    Unchained melodies: Is that all there is?

    by

    Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

    Author website

    Lieber and Stoller wrote it, Randy Newman arranged it, Peggy Lee sang it with an affectless perfection. This cover by Bette Midler has its charms, but by trying to backspin the lyrics, she inadvertently shows how much better was Peggy Lee’s understanding of the material.

    Tune in Saturday. I’ll show you something cool.

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    January 9, 2008

    It’s weblogging-advice day at Inman Connect, and Seth Godin is wired into the godhead, as usual

    by

    Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

    Author website

    Dumbing down:

    You’re under pressure to do that with your restaurant and your spiritual advice and your stump speech and your non-profit pitch. There are gatekeepers pushing you to dumb it down for the average.

    The thing is, when you dumb stuff down, you know what you get?

    Dumb customers.

    And (I’m generalizing here) dumb customers don’t spend as much, don’t talk as much, don’t blog as much, don’t vote as much and don’t evangelize as much. In other words, they’re the worst ones to end up with.

    I’ll take the smart customers/readers/prospects every time, please.

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    January 8, 2008

    Two dozen hounds on the hunt: Galen Ward joins BloodhoundBlog

    by

    Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

    Author website

    I started reading Rain City Guide in November of 2005 or so. Our second attempt at a weblog was foundering, floundering, flailing madly and failing badly, and I was out looking for clues. Galen Ward shone like a beacon, his posts incisive and informative, laced throughout with a pungent humor.

    I am beyond proud to announce that Galen is joining us today:

    Galen Ward is the co-founder of Estately.com, simultaneously the underdog and overachiever of map-based real estate search. He spends his time, reading, writing and coding for real estate from the heart of Seattle.

    Galen has a deep understanding of the arcane world of hi-tech real estate start-ups, so he brings us a perspective so-far absent from these pages. We’re honored to have him running with us.

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    January 7, 2008

    The Odysseus Medal: “What would David Gibbons do?”

    by

    Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

    Author website

    This week’s winners of The Odysseus Medal Competition are all vendors, which is a lucky chance, because I’ve been wanting to talk about vendor involvement in our world, the RE.net.

    I’ve written this much before: Why do we trust Michael Wurzer of FBS Systems? Because he’s one of us. He lives in the Web 2.0 world, the Cluetrain world. We believe — on faith, in some respects — that he wants to deliver his product in the same way, with the same commitment to integrity and transparency, that he expects other vendors to deliver their products to him. Why do we have this outsized faith in him? Because we know him — because he’s a part of the conversation.

    The same goes for Michael Price of mlbroadcast. We know where he stands on a host of issues, and we know he stands with us on the issues that matter to us. If I have any question about Mike or his business, I know I can shoot him an email and he’ll get right back to me, usually with more information than I thought to ask for.

    By contrast, Krista Baker of Realty Business Coach is just getting her toe in the water. Her approach so far has been more a matter of broadcasting information than engaging in the meta-debate.

    Another marketing coach taking that same broadcast approach is Gary Elwood of the Real Estate Marketing Blog. A few weeks ago I took him to task in a comment, saying, “You don’t link. You’re inaudible to the conversation.” Gary took me to mean that he wasn’t linking as a matter of footnoting his posts, but what I meant, as I’m sure most people reading this understand, is that linking is how we talk to each other, how the larger conversation is carried out.

    Now consider that I beat the snot out of a vendor just last week. I wasn’t being mean, I was just calling bullshit by its true name. Krista and Gary are coming along, but there are a bunch of preening would-be experts who presume to lecture us on this praxis we are perfecting, even Read more

    January 7, 2008

    BloodhoundBlog.TV: Dustin Luther, Jeff Turner and Daniel Rothamel on the Inman Connect Conference and the state of real estate video

    by

    Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

    Author website

    A four-way video podcast of Greg Swann plus three of the biggest names in real estate weblogging discussing this week’s Inman Connect Conference in New York.

    Dustin Luther talks about the presentation he and Brian Brady will be doing on The Long Tail in real estate weblogging.

    Jeff Turner and Daniel Rothamel (whose site sports a new magazine-style layout) will be doing a presentation on real estate video, and they talk about some of the challenges and opportunities facing would-be video adepts in the real estate world.

    My own audio is too loud, a problem we’ve had before and hope to have corrected sometime soon. My apologies for this defect, but this format — group video podcasting — is an effective way of connecting the islands of certainty in the oceans of information. As an example, where today Joel Burslem waxes rhapsodic about the promise of real estate video, a less sanguine (but much more ethereal) Jeff Turner takes you through some of the very high hurdles that must be leapt to produce effective, interesting video.

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    January 7, 2008

    “Cat will mew and dog will have his day…”

    by

    Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

    Author website

    But not today. We have a flaky drive on our file server in Texas. At some point tonight, we will be going down to install the replacement. The affected drive hosts 14GB of content, so the restoration process will probably take a little while. My bet is that we’ll lose some comments, too.

    The backup process has finished. I am going to have our datacenter move the old drive out and put a new one in so we can have the OS Reloaded, re-initialize the server, and then move your content back to the new drive. I will be updating this ticket at each step so you have an idea of how this is going. If you have any questions or concerns please feel free to update this ticket or call our support line and request to speak to Nate C, I would be happy to explain anything that is going on.

    My apologies. We’ll be back soon.

     
    We’re back… We seem to be about half-reasonable, but all the major systems are running properly. We lost comments between 1:40pm and 11:50 or so, MST. If you commented in that span of time, you’ll need to repost.

     
    Further notice… There are lingering problems. The techs in Texas apparently restored the content of the new hard drive from some old backups – how this could happen while many other files are current I don’t know. But, for example, here at BHB we are running from two small bits of an antique sidebar, with no footer at all. Worse, I am unable to affect the issue by FTP. The weblog part of BHB should be fine, since it runs out of a MySQL server. But we won’t be finished until the sidebar looks normal again.

     
    Update… We’re all the way back and all the way normal. If you post a comment yesterday between 1:30 and midnight MST and you don’t see it posted, you’ll need to post again. Otherwise, we’re golden.

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    January 6, 2008

    The Odysseus Medal competition — Voting for the People’s Choice Award is open

    by

    Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

    Author website

    A total of 15 entries on the short list this week, out of a long list of 55 posts. Vote for the People’s Choice Award here. You can use the voting interface to see each nominated post, so comparison is easy.

    Ahem: Please don’t spam all your friends to come and vote for you. First, what we’re interested in is what is popular among people who would have been voting anyway. And second, I’ll eliminate you for cheating. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

    Voting runs through to 12 Noon MST Monday. I’ll announce the winners of this week’s awards soon thereafter.

    Here is this week’s short-list of Odysseus Medal nominees:

    < ?PHP $AltEntries = array ( "Brian Brady -- Todd Kaufman The Todd Kaufman Problem Is Your Problem, Too”,
    “Dan Green — Mortgage economics     High Unemployment Rates Are Good For A Lot Of People“,
    “Dan Green — Political Calamity How Real Estate Markets Respond To Political Calamity Around The World“,
    “Dustin Luther — Zillow RE Auction I may have found the Tellar in Zillow’s Cellar!“,
    “Jay Thompson — Bureaucrats Gone Wild Todd Kaufman, Loudoun County Assessor — Starring in \”Bureaucrats Gone Wild\”“,
    “Jay Thompson — Free the MLS! Free the MLS! Another Board Forbids the Use of the Term \”MLS\”“,
    “Jay Thompson — Keyword Stuffing Keyword Jammed Posts are Polluting the \”RE.net\”“,
    “Jay Thompson — RSS Feeds RSS Feeds – The Full vs. Partial Conundrum“,
    “Kris Berg — Alphabet Soup Alphabet Soup“,
    “Krista Baker — 5 Steps 5 Steps for Planning any Marketing Campaign“,
    “Michael Wurzer — Open Letter Open Letter To Yahoo!, Google, Trulia, and Zillow, Encouraging Data Standards“,
    “Mike Price — Armchair Quarterbacking Armchair Quarterbacking Real Estate 2.0“,
    “Morgan Brown — 2008 Musings 2008 Musings – It’s going to suck a little less, depending who you are.“,
    “Russell Shaw — Todd Kaufman Can Loudoun County Assessor Todd Kaufman tell me what to say and not to say?“,
    “Troy W. Garris — Dodd Exits Presidential Race Dodd Exits Presidential Race; Focus Turns to Lenders“,
    );
    shuffle($AltEntries);

    $radioGroup = “”;
    $num = count($AltEntries);
    for ($i=0; $i< $num; $i++) { $pieces = explode("\t", $AltEntries[$i]); $radioGroup .= "

  • “;
    $radioGroup .= “$pieces[0], “;
    $radioGroup .= “$pieces[1]”;
    }

    echo (“

      $radioGroup

    “)
    ?>

    Deadline for next week’s competition is Sunday at 12 Noon MST. You can nominate your own weblog entry or any post you admire here.

    Technorati Tags: , ,

    • January 6, 2008

    To “concerned citizen,” who may or may not be a sock-puppet for Loudoun County Tax Assessor Todd Kaufman: The Bill of Rights exists to protect citizens from government, not the other way around

    by

    Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

    Author website

    This is an extended response to “concerned citizen,” who commented at length on my Loudoun County Tax Assessor Todd Kaufman has a friend post. The nom de poltroon “concerned citizen” may or may not be a sock puppet for Todd Kaufman himself, but it sure reads that way to me.

    Does not Mr. Kaufman have the First Amendment right to complain to the Realtor board? And does not the Realtor board have the duty to investigate whether there are false facts published?

    Don’t be absurd. You’re attempting to reframe the debate to portray Kaufman as the victim. What we have is a case of abuse of office, a government functionary attempting to abrogate the free speech rights of an innocent citizen. The Bill of Rights exists to protect citizens from government.

    The price for Mr. Kaufman exercising his rights, even if misguided, should not be ridicule

    To the contrary, this is the exact and perfect price, firmly established in the history of satire in America.

    and exposure of personal information.

    Straw Man Fallacy. Did not happen, at least not in anything posted on the RE.net.

    It comes across not so much as openness as exposure for further personal attack by others by way of letters to his home, phone calls and the like.

    Straw Man Fallacy again. We have done nothing of the sort. This may in fact be the Well-Poisoning Fallacy.

    It also distracts from the issue, which is, I think, whether any false information was published to consumers.

    The issue is Mr. Kaufman’s ham-handed attempt at censorship. Period. He made a bone-headed mistake, and he is paying the exact and perfect price for doing so. If you are his friend, you could help him find his way back to the light.

    Arguments pro and con in this matter should be couched in terms of truth or falsity of the blogger’s work,

    False. The right to free speech includes the right to be wrong. Your instant quibble will be to resort to libel or slander, but those are civil torts, to be adjudicated in a court of law. Absent proof of damage or malice, people in the United States are free to Read more

    January 5, 2008

    Loudoun County Tax Assessor Todd Kaufman has a friend…

    by

    Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

    Author website

    …in our world, no less. A brand-new LiveJournal weblog exists to document Loudoun County Tax Assessor Todd Kaufman’s brave battle against the dark forces of First Amendment defenders. You could say that it’s lame and testy and more than just a little bit tetched, but it ain’t easy to compete in this arena. And while it may not be the better part of valor to come into a duel of wits half-cocked, I think Todd and/or his brother-in-law deserve credit for not just whimpering in the corner. It’s a matter of principle, dammit!, even if, like Todd and his anonymous defender, you have the principle ass-backwards.

    Seriously: Whoever truly loves Mr. Kaufman should consider having a little chat with him. It’s not rare for a boneheaded political hack to stuff his foot into his mouth, but a true friend would try to help him find a way to stop chewing.

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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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