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Real estate coaching 2.0
2007-11-19 01:23:00
Real estate training and coaching isn't even at Web 1.0; its most basic business model relies on personalized one-on-one coaching methodology.  Brokerage training programs rely on a series of classes. Well known California based programs like Mike Ferry, Buffini and By Referral Only (all headquartered within 50 miles of each other in SoCal) rely on a hierarchy of coaches to personally deliver the message of their programs - the strategies and tactics of managing a professional career. And frankly one-on-one coaching works because it is customized to the individual, but it costs more and doesn't scale well. Real estate training should harness the Webinar - a virtual classroom where students can show up in their pajamas and coffee logged in on a web conferencing system like Webex and participating on a parallel phone line. The advantages: Students: Students prefer Webinars for convenience and don't need to commute to a classroom setting.Training content remains the same. Th...
More About: Estate , Real Estate , Coaching , Disintermediation , Real

Bloggers' sleep deprivation
2007-11-18 12:13:00
Finding the time to develop a blog is a big hurdle for the new blogger. I decided to use the time after 9:00pm to devote to this blog because I tend to function creatively at night. With blogging comes business opportunities, and I started chopping off sleep hours from 7-8 hours per night down to about 6 on average. I also began to take a 15 minute nap in the afternoon, which I realized I could do quite easily, even sitting upright, like a narcoleptic. At first, this change of lifestyle made me wonder about adverse health effects, but I realized the shorter sleep cycle did two things consistently: 1) I could fall asleep within 10 minutes of hitting the sack, and 2) I slept uninterrupted and deeper for at least five hours. Today's New York Times Magazine discusses the culture of sleep and how the 8-hours of sleep paradigm may not be the most natural. These articles personal development blogger Steve Pavlina wrote about sleep also put me at ease that my new regimen is on the right t...
More About: How-To , Bloggers , Sleep

Foreclosures are spiking, but few bloggers are following the foreclosure bi
2007-11-17 12:25:00
Foreclosures are big news - Google Trends shows the news reference volume on the word "foreclosures" crescendoed this summer and has continued to be a key economic focus.  However, the business of foreclosure - how real estate companies are mobilizing to address the transactional issues surrounding a spiking REO market - is surprisingly not being documented on the internet. Blogs are the best way to distribute timely information of an evolving niche of the real estate business. At one time in the not too distant past, there was a Carnival of Real Estate Investing. It went on hiatus with its final series in July as the last real estate investor gave up on a bleak housing market, and the bloggers disappeared too. The foreclosure business is still rather opaque... with such a swelling market, it has to be assumed there are huge opportunities evolving from crisis, but the resources to monitor this business in real time are few. Here's a quick list of foreclosure business resour...
More About: Foreclosures , Real Estate Investment , Foreclosure , Bloggers

Yesterday Zillow, today Loopnet partners with newspapers
2007-11-14 00:27:00
Get in line... it looks like the major listings websites are partnering with the newspaper publishers for syndication purposes. Next up after yesterday's Zillow publishing partnership announcement is Loopnet, which will distribute its showcase property listings to 100+ newspaper websites. From the Loopnet press release: With this new distribution deal, exposure for LoopNet?s Showcase Properties has dramatically increased, significantly enhancing the value of advertising a property on LoopNet through a Showcase Property Listing. Showcase Property Listings now receive triple the exposure of standard listings by Premium Members on LoopNet.com, as well as 10 times the exposure of Basic Listings. The quid-pro-quo: Loopnet gives their Showcase Property advertisers more bang for their buck and the newpapers receive commercial listings content. Here are a few more commentaries on the Zillow / Newspaper partnership:Zillow teams with Yahoo's Newspaper consortium... without Yah...
More About: Technology , Newspapers , Today , Yesterday

Old media, meet Zillow!
2007-11-13 00:14:00
Last month, I discussed the new lead generation paradigm shift: Content will be traded, packaged and bundled for leads/ads. Here's a good transactional example - Zillow has content in the form of a well trafficked consumer destination for automated home valuation data and newspapers have listings they sell to Realtors. Well today, Lloyd Frink announced Zillow's foray into the old world of newspaper real estate ads by "bundling" these traditional ads together with optional placement of the online ad on the Zillow site. How might this work exactly?  For example, real estate advertisers who currently buy classified listings in their local paper will be able to choose to have their listings and open house information shown on Zillow.  Not only will this contribute to the number of for-sale listings buyers can browse on our site, but also has the potential to create an incredibly comprehensive online source of open house information, by locality.  And this is just the ...
More About: Media , Meet

Tapping into Creativity during times of Crisis
2007-11-12 13:32:00
With every potential crash imaginable happening around us - housing, dollar, recession fears, inflation, spiking oil prices, Pakistan, Iran (no links required, just check the front pages of the online dailies) - it's time for self-examination to figure out the opportunities that always appear with crisis. I've always felt there are two ways to tap the subconscious for those epiphanies that lead to new thinking. The first method is essentially passive - meditation and other mind blanking processes to open up subconscious thought are effective daily practices. The second method is active and so mentally aggressive that it seems the antithesis of the mind blanking techniques - it's based on exhaustively writing down every thought about a topic until you're grabbing at straws to come up with ideas. The power of subconscious thought then wells up once the mind has started to disconnect from the logical and traditional ways one understands a topic. Start with "How to discover your l...
More About: How-To , Creativity , Times , Crisis , Tapping

Real time online gadgetry at NAR
2007-11-10 14:32:00
For NAR next week, the bloggers will be out in force covering the proceedings: Meet the Bloggers at the Incredible Agent booth #3444 NAR Expo, Sands Convention Center Las Vegas on Wednesday and Thursday. See schedule at MLPodcast.  I'm scheduled for Wednesday @ 4:00-5:00... I'd enjoy meeting up with you there. Friend Jeff Turner always alerts me to more online gadgetry that facilitates "real time" reporting. The most commonly used system is Twitter. Blogger Twitter force - Dustin says: So far, we have Jeff, Joel, Jessica, Keith and Myself prepared to twitter the NAR 2007. Follow along, or better yet tweet with us, at Jeff?s summary site: NAR Updates. (<<< pk: this update site looks like NAR Central to me) Jeff discovers, through a Twitter comment by Daniel Rothamel, the Utterz application. Utterz simply allows users to upload real time audio comments to a web or blogsite by phoning in the comment to the Utterz phone #. Technorati Tags: NAR2007, blogging, t...
More About: Events , Time , Online , Real , Real Time

Macs are better, I'm a convert
2007-11-08 11:56:00
Last month, I purchased a Macbook after my last PC notebook died... and there's no turning back.The big consumer barrier to purchasing a Mac has been the premium pricing. Machinist's Farhad Manjoo explains how Macs are comparably priced with PCs by factoring in the resale value of used Macs, a similar argument BMW uses with regards to its high resale pricing claim. It's well documented but here are the most obvious advantages I notice as a long time Windows user switching to a Mac: Boot up time - 30 secondsMicrosoft Vista is rumored to be a mess of an OS - so it compels users to switch to the elegant Mac OSNo crashing, although sometimes one needs to "force quit", which so far does what it purports to doWith the Mac/Windows OS interface, apparently one can run the Windows-only based real estate applications On the flipside, you need to get used to the one-click mouse (versus the right/left click of the Windows mouse). On the Mac, pressing the CTRL key in unison with the click f...
More About: Technology , Convert , Vert

Must see video from the TED conference
2007-11-07 02:31:00
TED, the all star conference that brings together prominent people from all walks of life to discuss ideas, hosts a variety of captivating videos on their blog.  This video of Larry Lessig's 2007 TED talk on the contradiction between user generated content ("UGC") and copyright is enlightening with hilarious examples (I generally don't watch too many videos for the same reason I don't watch TV... not enough time, but these TED videos are killer). The main point is our children are indeed creating and producing content using remixes or mashups of various media. And the copyright police are explicitly, i.e. by suing random, unlucky consumers who downloaded copyrighted media, and implicitly , i.e. using commercials that indict intellectual piracy as a crime, telling society that the new content creators are law breakers. This is corrosive to society and breeds the teenager-class cynicism almost everybody can relate to. The "control" of content becomes more futile as society ...
More About: Video , Technology , The Future , Conference

Social networking maintenance made easier
2007-11-06 00:15:00
I've often professed that the real estate professional's physical network is migrating to online social networks for a number of reasons: Ease of using networks to develop referralsAbility to virally network quicker and more efficiently through other contacts' networks because you know who they knowParty game- like online environment breaks the ice in business relationships The big problem has been the proliferation of a variety of social networks. I've always counseled that the three most used and trusted networks for real estate are Active Rain, Facebook and Linkedin (excluding the "widget" communities like MyBlogLog).  Social networking is a transcendent form of email - maintaining various social networks is like monitoring 7 unsynced email addresses. Google, the world's 300-pound internet gorilla and rankled by Facebook's success, stepped up to trivialize Facebook with its recent announcement to create an open social networking standard. By procuring the immedi...
More About: Social Networking , Networking , Made , Maintenance

The Mythical Foreign Investor in US Real Estate
2007-11-04 14:56:00
The Sunday New York Times reports on the influx of foreign buyers of new Manhattan condos... no surprise with the falling dollar making US real estate look cheaper, and the worldwide attraction of New York as a cosmopolitan nexus. Beyond this article, there are literally no recent news about foreign real estate investors in the US despite the fact that rumors abound. I could find only one topical article from National Real Estate Investment online about foreign investment in smaller cities. I cited several older resources on foreign investment in the US within July's US real estate looking attractive to foreigners. We know Asians like to buy condos in brand new high rises - it's the customary practice in Tokyo, Seoul or Shanghai. As San Francisco repositions itself as a West Coast Manhattan and gateway to Asia, the 25,000 or so new condos coming online in the South of Market area would seem to be attractive to the Asian investor. The condos will appeal to superrich part-time re...
More About: Real Estate , Investor , Foreign

Local business blogging beyond real estate
2007-11-02 11:56:00
Here's a paradox - those of us who know real estate agents would be the hard pressed to generically call them blogging pioneers. Yet, it's the real estate community that has, for the most part, reluctantly realized that business blogging is the best way to establish their online local presence.Who else needs to establish a local online presence?Restaurants - Owners, their chefs, their sommeliers, even their servers can discuss cooking and comment on the local food scene. Despite this May, 2005 article from Restaurants & Institutions magazine promoting restaurant blogs , I can't name one restaurant with a blog. They leave it up to the online restaurant reviewers and Yelp for driving traffic to them, but are at the mercy of the reviewers.Lawyers and accountants - two arcane, non-transparent professions are ripe for blogging to explain the vagaries of what they do. My accountant sends a weekly email newsletter that could easily be repurposed for a blog. The methodology of findin...
More About: Business , Estate , Real Estate , Blogging , Local

Eyefi - can't miss killer digital camera product
2007-11-01 11:03:00
Occasionally you see a product that is a can't miss proposition... and launched at a great holiday gift price point of $99. Eye-fi started shipping this week. It automates the downloading of pictures from a digital camera to your PC using a proprietary Eye-fi SD card and wifi. Every time you take a picture and bring the camera within range of your PC's wifi network, the automatic downloading of pictures happens. It can also upload pictures into online photo-sharing and social networking sites like Flickr and Facebook. It doesn't yet work on wifi networks outside the personal one... think of the utility when traveling. The company says they are working on it. The Eye-fi card is a 2gb SD card plus flash-driven wifi functionality for $99. Eye-fi's biggest marketing problem is their non-intuitive URL http://eye.fi... one needs to search for the product to get to it. Interestingly, a beneficiary of all that Eye-fi traffic is headed to www.eyefi.com, a Dutch company that has develop...
More About: Technology , Digital Camera , Camera , Product , Killer

Hail Curbed - the national real estate media network
2007-10-31 00:11:00
With $1.5 million in new financing, real estate blog pioneer Curbed.com now has the blessing to create a national blog network of mini-Curbeds. This is what consumers want - a brand name resource of local hyperlocal content, a lot of it devoted to real estate, served up within a blog network format. Congrats to Lockhart Steele and investors Nick Denton and Brad Inman among others who see the opportunity so clearly. They're media - they understand that a consistent, well produced blog network as "news service" is as comfortable to the consumer as Starbucks or the New York Times. Blog networks are ideal for consumer readership because they are assuming the role of the daily news. Writers are hand picked so there's quality control, and the set of Curbeds will position themselves as the status quo hyperlocal resources. This media is much bigger than real estate, Curbed can eventually focus on overtaking online local newspapers. Although Curbed will be creating the media network para...
More About: Media , National , Estate , Real Estate , Blogging

Local Blog Network Connects
2007-10-29 10:35:00
The seven blogging agents at Homescopes.com, the first Northern California blog network, have a unique routine... every Monday morning they congregate together on a web conferencing system and discuss how they are developing their blogs. It's a unique kind of coffee clache where everyone makes their own coffee and can drink it in their pajamas.Pat, Amber, Kevin, Ann, Sam, Marian ( Julie had just left, Pam and Joe couldn't make it...) Anyway, five of the Homescopes bloggers made it to our Homescopes first annual lunch together in San Francisco's Annabelle Bistro downtown. Many of the Homescopers hadn't met each other before (and it was my introduction to Sam Benson ). It was like a pen pal's reunion, a mini - Blog ger Connect. Mike Price of ML Broadcast and Damon Pace of Incredible Agent are rounding up another Blogger event for NAR next November 13-16... contact him for details.
More About: Blogging , Network , San Francisco Bay Area , Local

Real estate blogging is a unique kind of user generated content
2007-10-28 23:43:00
User generated content ("UGC") essentially erupted as a new type of media with the advent of MySpace and YouTube four years ago after a few stalled first generation attempts like Geocities. As UGC becomes Internet status quo, we see three types of UGC: Content developed expressly to become discoveredJustin.tv - one man becomes an icon to radical personal transparency, and spawned a channel for displaying the 24x7 lives of othersThe Apple ITouch commercial - college student creates an Apple ad and gets discovered by AppleContent developed for self expression to an "inner circle" audienceMySpace drivelFacebook drivelMost personal blogs Content developed to promote business or corporate objectives Real estate blogging is firmly implanted in the third category. Real estate is unique because it is the first "retail" industry to embrace the user generation of hyperlocal content for lead generation purposes. Obviously, other local retail - accountants, lawyers, handymen - can benefit...
More About: Estate , Real Estate , Blogging , User

Lead Generation 1.5 - Pay for leads and blog too!
2007-10-24 01:19:00
I've been discussing how lead generation paradigm is shifting from 1.0 - paying for lame leads - to 2.0 blogging and 2.x syndicating blog content as currency to get leads. Then I read at Joel's FoREM that RISMedia has instituted a kind of Tom Sawyer "blogging" program where participants pay RISMedia $2,000/month for writing articles about their locale. It's a collision of the old 1.0 "pay $2,000 for the leads" and 2.x syndicate blog content to get leads. RISMedia is not only selling expensive ad space but also getting bloggers to do the work of writing. LOCAL BLOG NETWORK PARADIGM RISMedia is in fact creating a local blog network on a national level, where each city is being sold as an exclusive for $24,000/year to one writer/agent. The financial hurdle imposes limits on the number of national contributors and actually makes the mapsite easier to use - if I'm a San Francisco consumer, I would just visit the San Francisco "blog".(Homescopes map of bloggers) Local blog network...
More About: Blogging , Blog , Leads , Generation , Lead

Blogs are attracting VC money
2007-10-22 00:45:00
SFGate, the San Francisco Chronicle online newspaper, has a Sunday article that I've been anticipating -  Yes, some blogs are profitable - very profitable. Valuations of blog have always been mysterious, and the article is the first I've seen in recent major media to broach the subject. Here's what the article states and the parallels to real estate blogging: Blog based media is gaining fast on traditional journalistic media More quickly than most anyone imagined, blogging is growing up. From the blogosphere's anarchistic roots, a professional cadre is emerging that is creating an industry whose top-performing businesses now earn serious money. The industry is expanding at warp speed. Blog-based media could just be poised to elbow aside traditional print and broadcast outlets to become one of the dominant sources of news, information and opinion, many observers believe. By extension, blog based real estate content is poised to become a dominant source ...
More About: Money , Blogging , Blogs

Redefining Community - from Hubs to Spokes
2007-10-18 02:30:00
With over 50,000 members, Active Rain continues to do one thing better than any other real estate site: introduce real estate professionals to the concept of online community. The discovery of how one can develop close relationship online with other bloggers is intoxicating and it's evident in all those comments on Active Rain blogs. I believe most non-bloggers view blogging solely as a time consuming journalistic exercise; Active Rain and blogging opens their eyes to a new paradigm in networking and referral systems they didn't know existed. New blogger Marian Bennett writes an article about her surprise at how blogging opens her world to new communities. For RE.net veterans, we can relate (hey if you read her article, send her a comment!). Marian admits to how overwhelming Web 2.0 and social networking seems at first glance. I recently noticed a sentence that encapsulates the new community paradigm The continous partial community is described by Schultz : ?we are spread ...
More About: Community , Blogging , Poke , Spoke , Unit

How the new global economy is the wild card in sustaining the housing marke
2007-10-17 18:07:00
I was somewhat surprised to see very thoughtful comments on Monday's piece The Fed's housing market objectives... all three seem to understand that the US economy and housing market has to be managed within the context of the global economy and other countries' housing markets... it's refreshing to see such thinking because the real estate community is so local, local and local and sometimes doesn't see the bigger economic picture that is driving their markets. Friend Dave G. at LakePlace offered up a comment: Question:Is it possible that a lot of the subprimers (like a big %) were actually spending a lot of money (credit cards, equity lines, etc..) over the past several years, playing a very important roll in the grander economic scheme? Also, #1 & #2 comments were excellent. Question for commenter #2: "So, we will continue to see cheap money in the months or maybe even years ahead." How do you see it ending in the coming months or years? Good or bad?I do not want to be...
More About: Economy , Card , Global , Wild , Housing

The Fed's housing market objectives
2007-10-15 10:09:00
Daily, I read a lot of market and economics blogs and Bloomberg-type websites; after all I was on Wall Street for eight years. I'm going to assume that real estate professionals who are trying to keep up with the dizzy markets since "subprime summer" may find it difficult to come to any conclusion about the housing market except "wait for it to settle". That's because every day the media and the blog commentary seem to focus on only one or two aspects of the economy, whether it's inflation targets, dollar dumping, subprime mess, housing starts, or various crash scenarios. No author has really described how the Fed plans to deal with the housing market in context with all these moving parts, and done it simply without a lot of technical talk or arcane interpretations of monetary policy. Here's a simple explanation about the Fed's target "good case" scenario, starting with the housing market: Housing market - Keep housing prices on a flat line - the Fed's objective is to insu...
More About: Economy , Market

Spousal flak chart
2007-10-12 21:51:00
Biz partner Kevin and I spent a solid week on the road up until yesterday and now he may be the recipient of the full blown sail at home. Fortunately, Kevin and his lovely wife are looking forward to parenthood, but sadly, Kev is sailing into red sky in morning (umm, sailor's warning) according to this chart. I'm letting him know that all he needs are two boys and ten years, and he'll be sailing red skies at night!
More About: Comedy , Chart , Char , Flak

Homescopes and the new local Blog Networks
2007-10-12 21:46:00
Homescopes.com is a new website developed by a group of Coldwell Banker real estate agents in the San Francisco Bay Area and Sonoma County. Its mission is to draw in consumers who are interested in hyperlocal news - market conditions, neighborhood details - supplied by agent bloggers covering different regions around the Bay (and later Northern California). Homescopes.com's local "blog network" site architecture (code named "uber-blog" for those who have been working with us) was developed to bring immediate traffic to its individual bloggers. The layman metaphor is Homescopes acts as the "newspaper front page" to aggregate and distribute the published content of their blogging agent "editors". As a content repository, Homescopes is positioned as a search engine magnet, and the resulting traffic flows through directly to the participating agents' blogs. Think magnifying lens. Homescopes will initially receive greater traffic than the blogs due to its portal position, but in the ...
More About: Technology , Networks , Blog , Local , Loca

The White Paper pdf is Dead
2007-10-12 14:32:00
In the Web 1.0 days, readers downloaded "White Paper " pdfs. Sometimes one needed to provide contact info, and out pops a nice print quality pdf that may have required the help of a desktop publishing expert. Here are my objections to downloading white papers:First, I never want to provide my contact info.Who cares if these white papers are print quality with graphs and doodads? I never print them out, let alone hand them to clients.Why do many of these white papers read like court documents with provisos and disclaimers? Just use plain talk.Why spend all those production resources - formatting, publishing, etc. - to develop what is basically a PR piece?Finally, why do I need to download and store the white paper on my hard drive, and let it collect dust there? 'l can't even tag it and will almost immediately forget about it.That's why I never download a white paper any more, unless I have to. Blog articles are the new white paper: They don't need to be print quality.They need t...
More About: Blogging , Dead

Lead Generation Paradigm Shift
2007-10-09 02:47:00
The lead generation paradigm is changing dramatically. Web 1.0 was about buying leads sourced from sites that collected contact info, usually as a toll for the consumer to see additional information. Web 2.0 promotes the free exchange of information with the presumption that the good will of such exchange would lead to a business relationship. The newest paradigm is just beginning to appear. Web 2.x will promote the free distribution of data as currency to attract leads. User generated content, whether from blogs or video, will soon be distributable across sites with consumer traffic - MLS sites, IDX broker sites, Trulia, Zillow, Realtor.com. It's a kind of content network and in order to participate, an agent needs a blog or another venue to display their user generated content. Old Paradigm - Pay $$$ for leads Impact Client impression Buy leads from Ho...
More About: Shift , Generation , Lead

Cyberhomes - data merchant
2007-10-05 02:18:00
The latest from Cyberhomes is the evolution of their business model. Since launch, Cyberhomes has espoused that it would provide the infrastructure for data delivery first to the brokerages, starting with automated home valuation. Dustin Luther called it a "white label" Zillow. Cyberhomes now powers the revamped AOL Real Estate site after AOL's contract expired with Realtor.com on September 30. The new role Cyberhomes plays is data liberator - AOL and other listings services no longer have to rely on listings data from gorilla competitor Realtor.com. Moreover, Cyberhomes adds parent Fidelity National Title housing data for more comprehensive analysis of the market. Cyberhomes doesn't have all of Realtor.com's listings yet. According to Marty Frame, GM of Cyberhomes, they have hired a national sales team of 9 so far to work with brokers to gain access to the listings. This allows Cyberhomes to quietly build the infrastructure for a national listings database. Unfortunately, Cy...
More About: Technology , Data , Merchant , Chan , Chant

The Long Tail of Real Estate Bloggers
2007-10-03 00:27:00
I had an interesting discussion yesterday about whether blogging will go mainstream and become a real estate marketing medium as ubiquitous tomorrow as agent websites are today. Remember in 1999 when having an agent website, or even an email address, was considered leading edge? After all, a blog is nothing more than an enhanced agent website. We discussed how Active Rain "owns" the blogger community. If indeed blogging becomes "de rigueur" or status quo, then owning the blogger community will eventually encompass owning the most influential voices of the real estate professional community. Why? There's a long tail of smallish cities and towns all across America that still don't have blogging agents. As they come on board (and you see the half hearted blogging attempts of agents in some of these towns on Active Rain), they will understand the community aspects of blogging (as bloggers already understand) and become integrated into the close-knit "blogosphere". You see the evidenc...
More About: Estate , Real Estate , Blogging , The Future , Bloggers

What Active Rain should do now
2007-10-01 10:58:00
Watching the Active Rain / Move.com imbroglio from the blogosphere sidelines has been fascinating... here's a strategic take on how Active Rain can move forward:Active Rain's AssetActive Rain has one asset that differentiates their social network from any other real estate site: it owns the bloggers. This core group of real estate professionals represents the social networking hubs, the influencers that are prized by viral marketing advocates. They are intensely loyal to AR and in aggregate, the voices of these bloggers have been underestimated because the consumer has yet to discover their existence.If you believe blogs and other Web 2.0 constructs will eventually be adopted as the new marketing platform for agents (and we think so), a real estate futurist has to project when consumers will realize that blogs and blogging agents are go-to sources for their transaction needs. From this perspective, AR's management may be premature in selling AR because the market that will develo...

How to get a reader to store your blog and contact details for future refer
2007-09-27 17:25:00
For real estate bloggers, capturing a reader who happens by your blog via a search engine, link or other referral means is critical to building the readership. Reader s generally do four things to store your blog for reference purposes: Bookmark the site via the browser bookmarking function - browser bookmarks tend to be disorganized and difficult to use (I hardly use them) Subscribe to the RSS feed - usually done after reader has visited site enough times to believe it's RSS-worthy... but you want them to store your site details to get that second visit! Subscribe by email - similar multiple visitation process to subscribing to the RSS feed, but more intrusive due to today's email glut ( I never subscribe by email) Bookmark via a social bookmark like Del.icio.us - probably the easiest instant method, but the reader must be tech-savvy to understand social bookmarketingSo there are hurdles... What's missing is a simple way for a reader to store your blog/website address or contact...
More About: Future , Contact , Blog , Store

Google Maps with customizable icons
2007-09-26 00:28:00
Google Maps is getting close to becoming a usable mapping tool for broker websites. They've introduced customizable icons (hint: to add a customizable icon, one needs to click on the existing placemark icon). Above is a screenshot of a map I created in about an hour showing a short list of Bay Area real estate bloggers by address (btw, this map can be embedded into a blog, but I did not because there's a bug - explained later). The utility is simple - to know more about a certain region of the Bay Area, just click on the blogger picture.When clicking on the blogger's picture, the popup screen can contain widgets for contact, communication and data delivery - in my case, a Jaxtr phone call app, a Plugoo chat application and a feed subscription. There's an application bug - the script for the Plugoo application doesn't stay in the editor so I did not embed it into this blog. Here is a the link for the mapping application above. These popup screens on Google Maps act like min...
More About: Google , Icons , Google Maps , Googl