Mike's Corner - Real Estate's "New Rules - New Tools™"

REBarcamp A HUGE Success

2008-07-23T09:41:00.003-05:00

Good morning! I'm blogging to you from a $12.95 per day hotel Internet connection in the most wired City in the World, but I digress.. REBarcamp was everything I hoped it would be and more. The sessions were great, the turnout was better. I think we had at least 120 people, maybe more. Brad Coy, Andy Kaufman, Todd Carpenter and all of the other volunteers and organizers worked hard to make it happen. There are some great stories to tell, but I need to grab a cab to Inman Connect, more to report later. Daniel Rothamel of The Real Estate Zebra along with Grant and Gia of RealSeekr came up with a very creative surprise. Blogger Trading Cards, with super heros. I am now forever to be known as PodcastMan. My Power? Sending videos to every corner of the web. Oh yeah!

What Do You Love and/or Hate About Your Smart Phone?

2008-07-17T01:42:00.003-05:00

I'll be participating in a podcast regarding the iPhone and smart phones in general today. One of our talking points will be centered around the results from this survey. If you get a chance to take it before 2 pm central today, we will have a better sampling of data. It only takes a brief minute or two to complete.

LiveBlogging REBarcamp?

2008-07-15T15:06:00.001-05:00

Todd Carpenter is gathering a list of those that plan to live blog REBarcamp so He can create a collaborative feed. An awesome idea. Check out the request here.

REBarcamp is Right Around The Corner

2008-07-08T18:41:00.007-05:00

The first ever Real Estate BarCamp is scheduled to take place on 7/22 at The Swedish American Hall in San Francisco. If you're planning a trip to the Inman Connect conference, why not come in a day early and join in.

Not sure what a BarCamp is? Tune in to Dustin Luther's roundtable discussion Wednesday at 1 p.m. pst and get all of the answers to all of your questions. You can also read a great article on REBarcamp from Inman columnist Matt Carter. Update: Here's the recorded call.

4Realz Roundtable Re-Cap

2008-07-03T10:46:00.003-05:00

I'm glad Dustin has asked me to become a regular participant on the 4Realz Roundtable discussions, especially this week. The discussion was centered around Real Estate video. Check it out here:

Next week's Roundtable has an earlier start time and should be an interesting one. Be sure to add it to your schedule, call in or join in the online chat to get your questions answered.

Carnival of Real Estate # 97 Up At Trulia Blog

2008-06-30T12:15:00.003-05:00

Rudy at TruliaBlog posts his picks for this week's CORE 4th of July style. Transparent Real Estate hosts the next Carnival of Real Estate. Click here to submit your best posts.

Podcast Interview - CREST - Center For Real Estate and Social Technology

2008-06-27T14:49:00.009-05:00

Ben Martin, the communications and new media director for the Virginia Association of Realtors recently contacted me regarding a new initiative being backed by VAR. It's called CREST, The Center for Real Estate and Social Technology. The center is being billed as a research effort designed to help real estate professionals enter into or improve upon their efforts in blogging and social media. (CREST's efforts are not limited to the Virginia area.)

The first effort is a 14 question survey on blogging. The results will be announced at REBarcamp on 7/22. I had the opportunity to do a podcast call with Ben and Danilo Bogdanovic, a blogger in Virginia that is helping with the launch of the Center.

I think the idea behind CREST could go a long way toward helping real estate professionals create the best mix of social media and blogging tools and look forward to the results of their data mining efforts. Please take a few minutes to complete the survey and help CREST meet their goal of 100+ responses to their first effort.

< Click To Liten To The CREST Podcast Interview.

< Click to subcribe to the Mike's Corner Podcast Feed.

4Realz Roundtable Tonight

2008-06-26T07:57:00.003-05:00

Tonight's 4Realz Roundtable invites agents and brokers to chime in about the technology tools that they use to help the selling process. What works for you? What doesn't? What's new and exciting? It should be another interesting discussion. Join in the conversation at 4 pm pacific.

The call was great, if you didn't get a chance to participate, you can listen here:

BravoTV Feeds The Need For "Home" Entertainment

2008-06-25T18:14:00.004-05:00

BravoTV continues to entertain the desires of the viewing public's appetite for all things home related this season. I'm guessing that with everyone deciding that it makes more sense to travel no further than their own hallways for entertainment this summer, home related television programs will become even more popular than every before.

The popular series "Flipping Out" returns on Tuesday's at 10. A series entitled "Million Dollar Listing" premieres on August 15th. If you're the type who can't get enough of living vicariously through the trials and travails of those in real estate, you'll want to tune in.

Harness The Power of Neighborhood Knowledge

2008-06-23T13:22:00.006-05:00

Brian Boero of 1000WattConsulting recently published a post entitled Online real estate's final frontier: The neighborhood. As the words in the comment box kept flowing I realized perhaps the comment was better suited to a full post. I recommend reading his post before completing this one, it's dead on.

I have addressed on many occasions the need for brokers and agents to embrace the fact that their roles as advertisers and marketers now include that of producers and publishers. There are no real barriers to entry regarding resources and knowledge to adapt to the shift in today's marketing landscape. It just requires a commitment. The successful RE professionals of the future will stop over thinking the web and realize that consumers primarily want 3 things when they are engaged in a new media experience.

Listings with all of the relevant and useful enhancements that come with them.
The value of their current property
Neighborhood Information.

The caveat to number 3 hits right to the heart of a comment left on Brian's post from reader that, in my opinion, correctly identifies the fact that great community content will be built from the "ground up" by experienced RE professionals.

It is impossible to deliver the type of neighborhood content that a consumer truly desires without having in depth, feet on the street intelligence gathering and the experience necessary to craft and present community content.

David Gibbons and I discussed this concept in a recent podcast interview. Consumers want to experience your market knowledge. They want your unique perspective on community and they realize that they are paying for that consultative service. A semantic web is going to take care of pulling together all of the dry data points when it comes to community. More interestingly though, semantic technology is going to result in an uncanny ability to place relevance on generated content that lives in a cloud outside of tax data and crime stats.

The RE professional that starts to seed every corner of that cloud with unique, hyper local content will be glad they did.

If a "relationship map" is going to be delivered with objects of information, you want some of those objects to be yours. Look at Google's "universal search" and the impact it has on my point. Every document, every audio file, every video you produce on neighborhood content or listings is now a part of search. A highly relevant link to a podcast in iTunes will be just as likely to show up as a web site, in fact that is already starting to happen in many cases. A PDF brochure that has been properly structured is just as "searchable" as a static HTML web document. The same goes for a Flickr database of photos or a channel of videos in Yahoo video. By producing and publishing high quality, relevant content, you are greatly increasing your opportunity to gain that all important "top of mind" awareness with prospects at every stage of the process, including very early stage consumers that may not enter into a transaction for years to come. When they do, you will own that little piece of gray matter that says, let's call "Ima Realtor", I've been following her community content and blogs for years. Don't just take my word for it, ask Teresa Boardman, Dru Bloomfield or Jay Thompson how many of their clients started off merely as blog viewers or casual commenters. Ask Connor MacIVOR about the almost immediate impact his MLBroadcast feed had on his search exposure. You're bound to find out more than you ever wanted to know about the impact that good "hyper local" content has on your efforts.

The web has changed the profile of the consuming public. This change is resulting in an empowered consumer seeking transparency and holding a completely different set of expectation levels. If you see that as an opportunity, not an obstacle, you'll be joining a small network of folks that will emerge as the architects of new and profitable business models. If you A. Avoid Over Thinking and B. Wrap your mind around the concept of content production and publishing as opposed to merely advertising and that old path of least resistance, "getting back to basics":, you can enjoy driving from the Catbird seat with some of the RE.net folks that can attribute most of their business to these type of efforts.

We have many clients that have created really great neighborhood tours that are not only great enhancements to blogs, listing presentations and web sites, they are powerful tools for creating exposure to agent and broker brands through search engine optimization. Below is a screen shot that shows the power of Hyper Local community content.

A First American Title Fastbroadcasting client who is primarily a buyer's agent asked her rep how she could take advantage of Video Podcasting without any listings. She recommended that the agent (Patti Lacy, Coldwell Banker United) go out and take a few shots of her farm area and build a community tour. She went a little wide with it by keeping it focused on Katy and West Houston, but the results are nothing short of amazing. Her chosen keyphrase of "Katy West Houston Real Estate" show up as number 1 and number 7 placements in Google.

In selecting a real estate professional, consumers want the confidence that your knowledge of community will help them make one of the toughest decisions to one of the most difficult questions of life: Where do I raise my family? Do you know the educators in the area? Which day care is the best suited to a growing family? Do you know as much about the farmer's market as you do about the local big box grocers? In my mind this is where the rubber meets the road in establishing the value of your services. There are many Web 2.0 tools are perfectly suited to your ability to market that gray matter database of valuable information.

Check out some of the community content our clients are syndicating across the web and start to think of ways you can harness the power of community in your marketing efforts to set yourself apart from the pack. If you would like some tips on the best way to use our service to accomplish this, please email me directly (mprice AT mlbroadcast dot com, I have some great ideas and I'm in the mood to dispense some free consultation!

CORE #96

2008-06-23T13:00:00.002-05:00

The 96th edition of the Carnival of Real Estate is up at Renthusiast.Com. Next week's carnival will be hosted by Trulia Blog. Get your posts in by Sunday to be considered. Be sure to subscribe to the CORE Podcast as well.

4Realz Round Table Discussion Tonight

2008-06-19T12:36:00.003-05:00

I am honored that Dustin Luther of 4Realz has asked me to be a regular voice on his weekly Round Table discussion. There have been 3 thus far and they have been great discussions involving some of the brightest minds in the RE.net.

Tonight's discussion has to do with web site analytic tools. If you're an agent or broker that has an interest in the traffic your blog, podcast or web site is generating, you should log on or call in and get involved. It should prove to be a very informative session.

International Real Estate Portal To Speak 6 New Languages

2008-06-19T11:03:00.003-05:00

Properazzi, an international real estate listings portal has announced that beginning next month they will be integrating Arabic, Greek, Hungarian, Czech, Norwegian and Swedish languages, with Hebrew to follow.

Yannick Laclau, CEO of Properazzi.com, says, "What we're hearing from agents is a need for portals that really understand their buyers - how they search and what they want from the experience - and that allow them to reach out to more potential leads. By opening up its website to new nationalities, Properazzi's just become an even more attractive tool for agents to target foreign buyers."

Properazzi used log file analysis of the over 1 million visitors they receive monthly as means to determine which languages to add.

A New Contributor To Mike's Corner

2008-06-18T09:44:00.008-05:00

We're going to try to something a little unique with our blog. Over the past month I have had the honor of getting to know one of our clients, a client that like many others is enjoying tremendous success with our product. Connor MacIVOR of the RE/MAX Paris 911 team in California has been singing the praises of our service throughout the RE.Net. In addition, he has found ways to extend the exposure of his episodes using his Realtor.Com account, Utterz, Flickr, his blogs and many other venues.

I asked Connor if he would be interested in doing a series of guest posts. These posts will be tutorials that walk you through the processes that Connor uses for his broadcast channel and episodes. Since becoming an MLBroadcast client, the Paris911 team has seen a dramatic improvement in search engine results. Connor has also seen an increase in call volume and cites his broadcasting endeavors as one of the features that helped them land a nice REO account recently.

You can find Connor everywhere in the social media channels of the RE.net and he is always willing to lend a hand to a fellow RE professional. We're proud to have him on board! Look for his first post to be up in the next day or so. It will show you how to upload your MLBroadcast.Com video episode to Realtor.Com.

P.S. I forgot to mention that Connor and Paris MacIVOR will be joining us at REBarcamp next month!

Be Part of a World Record

2008-06-16T11:40:00.003-05:00

Tomorrow is Download Day. The folks at Mozilla, the open source team who code the FireFox web browser are attempting to set a world record for the number of software downloads in a single day. If you haven't yet tried Firefox as your web browser of choice, tomorrow is a perfect reason to give switching a try. It's fast, it supports 3rd party plug ins and provides an overall better web browsing and web application platform than any other alternative, especially if you're one of many who are still using the bane of every web developer's existence, Internet Explorer 6.

Over the weekend I was able to help an RE professional who had never used an ftp (file transfer protocol) client before by having her download FireFox and then add the 3rd party plug-in FireFTP. Within minutes she was transferring files to our servers without any need for complicated tutorials or difficult interfaces. Do yourself a favor and pledge to download FireFox 3 with millions of others tomorrow. You will make yourself and an untold number of web developers happy!

Seeking The Social Solution - A Podcast Interview with Founders of RealSeekr.Com

2008-06-12T00:14:00.006-05:00

How many times have you groused about something that didn't work exactly the way you thought it should and proclaimed your ability to do it better? Have you ever acted on it? Grant and Gia Freer are Realtors in Florida that took action on their frustration with realtor.com by launching RealSeekr.com

After 18 months of development, Grant and Gia are crafting a residential real estate web destination that connects IDX data feeds, foreclosures, for sale by owner listings. blogs and just about every social networking tool under the sun, (including video conferencing) into a service that they believe will define what a real estate portal should be, one that connects consumers and real estate professionals in a tangible way.

Grant and Gia are passionate about their new endeavor and I appreciate the time they took to familiarize me with their product. I've invited some Realtor friends and clients that are advanced users of everything in the RE.net and social networks to check out RealSeekr and give us some feedback. We'll share that in an update soon.

Click Here To Listen To The Podcast Interview With Grant and Gia of RealSeekr

Click Here To Subscribe To Our Entire Podcast Feed In iTunes

The 94th Edition of The Carnival of Real Estate

2008-06-09T12:28:00.005-05:00

Welcome to the 94th edition of the Carnival of Real Estate. I had the pleasure of hosting the 34th CORE and I am finding it interesting to create a frame of perspective based upon the experiences at a 15 month interval. I think having the original hosts back a year later is a great idea and I would love to hear more in the host podcasts about the progression of blogging in the RE.net.

I received 28 submissions for CORE 34, this time I received 23. The posts this week predictably centered around the topics of foreclosure and tough market conditions. As many of you know we had a pretty crazy week due to an explosion at MLBroadcast's data hosting facility, I budgeted time to really concentrate on the content and didn't have time to craft a cool theme. In hindsight should have taken a cue from Jay Thompson and put out a theme idea request on Twitter. Guess I'm just not the Twit Jay is. :) (He will get me back for that.)

This Week's Overall winner is Stephanie Edwards Mussa, a Realtor here in Houston with an awesome blog that is focused on Green living. I think she did a great job of explaining how energy efficiency could be used as a key marketing factor in helping a listing stand out. These days when you have perhaps a half dozen houses or more for sale in close proximity it can be difficult challenge to draw eyeballs. The one thing on the top of everyone's mind these days are energy costs. If you have a listing that has the ability to identify what Stephanie points to as the cost vs. value factor, it just might be what is needed to win the tough battle.

Stephanie Edwards-Musa presents Which Home Is Yours? posted at Turning Houston Green, saying, "Setting your home apart when advertising it for sale. It can be more than countertops and hardwood floors."

Second place goes to another energy related post from Roberta Murphy of Luxury Home Digest. She starts off with a story about her grand father and his decision on where to live in Deadwood South Dakota in the late 1800's. It's a great read and really drives home the importance of the influences that drive decisions in real estate. My wife has a real estate photography business and one of her long time clients is a specialist in Mid Town Houston real estate. I remember taking a ride with her in the fall of '06 to do a shoot for that client. We were making small talk as he measured the property and I brought up how frustrated I was with rising gas prices. He looked up from corner he was bent down in and let the tape measure snap back into place, smiled, stood upright and said, not me! Every time gas spikes a nickel a gallon I can count on twice as many showings. All of those downtown commuters from up north where you live start to think about how much they can save by living closer to work and they call me! Roberta's post brings that fact into perspective really well.

Roberta Murphy presents A Radical Proposition for Real Estate posted at Luxury Home Digest

Third place goes to John Harper of The Harper-Mees team. His post on the four truths of real estate uses a Buddhist twist on the issue of a tough market place and how to deal with the suffering. I'm not a Buddhist, but I have studied it a little and I respect many of its tenets, especially the accountability and tough love aspects that seems to be a common thread with some of the teachings. When the going gets tough, sometimes we just need a simple reminder of the things we must do on a daily basis to get back to where we once belonged.

John Harper presents Four Noble Truths of Real Estate posted at San Ramon Danville Dublin CA Real Estate.

There were some other good posts that deserve honorable mention and a ton of foreclosure posts that are just getting lost in the din of 1,000's of other "what, where, why how and when" posts.

Here are the Honorable Mentions:

APH presents Landlord Finally Free to Live in His Own Home posted at Market Urbanism, saying, "After battling in court since 2003, this family is finally able to turn their 60 room apartment building into one gigantic home for themselves. Of course, the beneficiaries of the rent-controlled apartments don't believe the owner's family should have the right to live in their own building."

Jay Thompson presents "Marketing on Twitter" posted at The Phoenix Real Estate Guy.

Dan Melson presents Protecting My Buyer Clients Good Faith Deposit posted at Searchlight Crusade.

Craig Schiller presents 5 Simple Factors That Keep Your Home From Selling posted at HOME STAGING, Rants & Ravings

Tracy Coenen presents Auditor reveals how risky mortgages were allowed to go through posted at FRAUDfiles.

Nickel presents Second Homes and Tax Nightmares posted at fivecentnickel.com

John Lockwood presents Verbal Acceptance Isn’t Worth the Paper It Isn’t Printed On posted at Sacramento Real Estate Blog, saying, "This article digs into a whole host of problems caused when we first start entertain the idea that we can accept an offer verbally.

Larry Lohrman presents Propvid.tv Sets A High Standard For Property Video posted at GeekEstate Blog.

Doug Willis presents Pasadena Real Estate Broker Announces the Secret, Mankind to Benefit posted at Up2Date.

Cliff Jacobson presents Be Careful What You Wish For, The NAR And The DOJ. posted at Clifford Jacobson, saying, "What next for the NAR and the Real Estate Search Engines?"

Nate Moch presents Upside Down Auction...Not For the Faint of Heart posted at Zillow Blog.

CORE95 will be hosted by one of my favorite RE.net bloggers, Maureen Frances of the MIOakland County Blog. Be sure to get your submissions in before Sunday.

Technorati tags: carnival of real estate, blog carnival.

Tech Success Starts With Early Adopters

2008-06-05T13:51:00.003-05:00

When I originally formed the concept of MLBroadcast, (originally MLPodcast), I wanted to be the first company to put a real estate listing in iTunes. I've been involved with listing enhancements and distribution for a long time, in fact, it dates back to 1995. My involvement with Quicktime technology sparked my keen interest in what was happening with audio podcasting. I knew it was a matter of time before Apple extended the DTD (document type definition) to include video content for podcasting.

I also knew my first clients would be Diane and Bruce Kink. I have worked closely with them over the years on several technology fronts and knew that they would embrace the concept of syndication and distribution immediately. After converting all of their listing photos to videos (click here to see the feed), we added the very first real estate video podcast to the iTunes podcast directory. That was in February of '06.

The press picked up on it quick and we ended up with local articles, national articles in Inman and B2B magazine and more. It was basically the birth of our company. I took the idea to my business partners, Jay Jackson, our CTO and Mark Basile, our Exec VP. We incorporated officially in June of '06 and have been going great guns since.

I wanted to take the opportunity on our company's 2nd anniversary to talk with Bruce Kink about early technology adoption and a little more. I think you'll enjoy listening to the podcast interview.

Thanks to Bruce and 100's of other early adopters, we are innovating in the space of the distribution of listing enhancements and the best is yet to come. I will be featuring interviews with more of our clients soon, coming up next, Connor MacIVOR of Paris911.com.

Click Here To Listen To The Podcast Interview With Bruce Kink

Click Here To Subscribe To Our Podcast In iTunes

New Roundtable Discussion With Dustin Luther of 4Realz.Net

2008-06-05T10:39:00.004-05:00

Last week I had the honor of participating in a roundtable discussion hosted by Dustin Luther of 4Realz regarding the DOJ/NAR, data display policies and more. It was a great hour of opinion and ideas.

Dustin has invited me to join in on another round table discussion tomorrow. This week we are going to take on the topic of Social Networking in the real estate profession. We will be discussing newcomers to the space like RealSeekr, Plurk, and MyDealBoook as well as stalwart applications such as Twitter and Facebook. Join the conversation today at 4 PM PST.

Connect With Us At Inman

2008-06-05T09:52:00.002-05:00

It's that time of year again. Inman SF Connect will be held July 23rd - 25. I've attended quite a few connect conferences and the event gets better every time. In addition to this year's event we will be participating as a sponsor in the first ever Real Estate Bar Camp, which will take place on the 22nd. I hope to see you there!

It's our 2nd Blogiversary

2008-06-04T18:53:00.002-05:00

This blog is officially 2 years old. When I sat down to write the first post I had no clue that it would turn into the kind of journey it has. The idea for the blog came from my business partner and best friend, Mark Basile. We were discussing the potential of blogging for real estate professionals and working on ways for our clients to integrate their podcasts into their platforms. When Mark and I get together, the conversations go on for hours. We discuss the state of the industry and more specifically the ways that technology and new tools have an impact. I love what I do and I spend a great deal of time on research. Mark picked the name for the blog and encouraged me to share with the world the topics we discuss and what I spend so much time trying to stay ahead of.

Mike's Corner has won it's share of accolades and shows up on a bunch of top RE.net blog lists. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't proud, but awards and lists honestly mean very little to me. We didn't really have any goals when we started. We just wanted to participate in the process of the RE.net and hopefully strengthen our brand traction. What matters in the end is the value it provides and I think on that front we can call it successful.

So many things have come along since June 2006 it's hard to imagine its only been 2 years. Social media has created a whole new set of issues and landscapes for RE professionals to navigate. Market conditions are forcing the hand of those unprepared to maximize every corner of the web's reach.

If you've been a regular reader of this blog, I appreciate the time you've spent here. I also apologize for letting it get a little dusty over the past couple of months. We're different than most tech start ups. We operate on good old fashioned cash flow and we squeeze a great deal of great work out of a very small staff of passionate people. Add in an explosion at our server hosting facility this past weekend, mix in the general trappings of life itself and you have a recipe that had to leave out blogging as an ingredient for a while. I really enjoy the endeavor and I am happy to say you should start seeing more frequent postings and a line up of some great podcast interviews soon.

I can't believe how many great and talented folks I have met through blogging. There are too many to mention, but you know who you are and I cherish the relationships I have with all of you. So thanks for another year. I am off to work on some new content.

Cheers
MP

Mike's Corner Hosting The Carnival of Real Estate

2008-06-04T18:34:00.002-05:00

Mike's Corner is hosting the 94th Carnival of Real Estate. Visit the Carnival Submission Form and submit your best post.

Data Center Update

2008-06-04T08:45:00.006-05:00

Over the weekend the data center that hosts the server for MLBroadcast.Com experienced an explosion in their electrical systems. This explosion required the data center to put a disaster recovery plan in to effect that had our server down until around 3 pm on tuesday. Everything is operational again. E-mail sent to us between Sunday and early Wednesday morning has most likely bounced back to your account. We have had to move some of our domain name services to an additional server we are in the process of setting up as a mirror. If you had any important communication please resend it to support at mlbroadcast or 360podcast at gmail.com.

We apologize for your content not being available for this brief period. As Murphy's law would dictate, we were in the planning stages of setting up a mirrored server at our hosting facility's Dallas data center when all of this took place. It is an extremely rare situation, in fact, I have another server that had been running with this same company for over 7 years almost non-stop. Just the same, we are making plans to be able to switch to a mirrored server in the event that something this catastrophic may happen again in the future.

A note regarding the service and response from our hosting company, The Planet. They are one of the largest and most well respected businesses of their kind and I personally think they have done an outstanding job responding to and resolving this issue. The communication they provided during the process was stellar.

Update: As of 10 am this morning we are still having some issues with our ordering system and email. We are working on the DNS issues and should have them resolved soon. Thanks. MP

Update: As of 1:30 pm all ordering systems for MLBroadcast, Real Living and FastBroadcasting .com are operational. If you have an issue with an outstanding order or questions regarding new orders, please open a trouble ticket at http://www.mlbroadcast.com/support

A 20 lb Sledge Hammer and Other Observations

2008-05-22T13:39:00.003-05:00

Because I still can't seem to get caught up enough to finish any worthwhile posts, I thought I would let you know what I have found interesting in my reading and research lately:

Spencer's Post About Realty Times Article on Realtor.Com Draws over 40 Comments

HAR is advertising heavily in Social Networking Sites. I have seen their ads on LinkedIn and Facebook numerous times. If you think social media marketing isn't important, ask someone at HAR why they think it is. In fact, when I get time, I'll do it for you!

Dustin says Outside.In has a chance. I went to the site, not only was my neighborhood not listed, neither was Spring or The Woodlands. Until they get better coverage, I think the jury is still out. There is more to Houston than Bellaire and River Oaks.

The Bloodhound Blog Unchained event wrapped up recently. Tons of videos on their YouTube Channel. Just look at the number of views to find those worth watching, it's a pretty good gauge.

Jay Thompson gives an in depth look at the new web site analysis tool, Woopra. I guess there are just not enough words left in the english language to come up with a start up name that makes any sense any more.

Matt Rathbun has over 22 answers to the question, "I read real estate industry blogs because....." Jump over and add your answer.

We have a new client that is one of the most colorful and genuinely nice people I have spoken with in ages. Is it possible for a client to be more excited about our product than we are? No. But this guy sure comes close. Check out what Connor MacIVOR of Paris911.Com has to say about his new MLBroadcast feed in his blog and on Active Rain (members only). I love the sledge hammer and speeding truck analogies. His feed is the featured MLBroadcast client in the side bar of this blog.

Ask A Ninja About the Future of Online Video

2008-05-22T12:04:00.001-05:00

This guy is funny. (H/T to MorganB via Twitter)