Long Tail, Business Blogs and Measurement

There has recently been some chatter about long-tail-focused blogging, especially in that little corner of the blogosphere occupied by your local-loving real estate bloggers. And since I can’t help but wade into something that could possibly be measured I bring you this post.
If you want a sparkling essay on why long tail strategies may be [...]

Short followup on Craigslist and HTML

The HTML that will allowed on Craigslist should be enough to make a nice layout. You get images, tables (as much as I abhor table-based web development), headers and the font tag. Sure it’s like we’re rolling back the clock to 1999. But it won’t be too difficult to make attractive ads with the tags [...]

Last week: Lots of thinking on the interwebs

I didn’t get a chance to give a weekly overview of activity on the RE.web last week so I’ll do a quick rundown. Lots of deep thoughts were floating out there last week, the ripples are still spreading on some of them.
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Craigslist limits use of HTML, chaos ensues.

I heard via an Inman Community posting that the popular classifieds-style site Craigslist has announced its intention to limit the use of HTML. An exceptionally heated forum resulted (warning, much of the language used in the posts lacks sophistication and subtlety).
I, personally, don’t have a problem with HTML in Craigslist, but some folks clearly do.
Wading [...]

Online Video Audience study by Pew Research

The Pew Internet & American Life Project did a study earlier this year about usage of online video. The total percentage of people surveyed who had ever interacted with a video-sharing site was 48%. But even more intriguing is this:
15% of respondents said they had used a video-sharing site “yesterday” — the day before they [...]

Performance Optimization for Real Estate Part 3: Benchmarks

Alright. We’ve done the broad-stroke overview of performance optimization. We’ve established some objectives. We took a side-road to learn a bit about picking something to measure on our website. Now it’s time to benchmark.
Why Benchmark?
The goal of a benchmark study is to figure out how your site is performing before you do anything at all. [...]

Foreclosure Maps

Another map post.  Today it’s foreclosures, via HotPads.com.
Using the widget tools in the upper left of their map, select heat maps and then foreclosures to get a map overlay of the United State real estate foreclosure data. It takes awhile for the image to load.
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Real Estate Technology Week in Review

A little run-down in the week’s runout, in case you missed it all:

Trulia does Google Street View
Flickr does Video
My personal pic for Bad MLS Photo of the Week
Catfight at the Dogpound yields lessons in civility and philosophy
How-to on Hashtags

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Flickr Allows Video Uploading

Long rumored and now live, read about it on the Flickr blog. The example above is from Dunstan Orchard. A few quick tidbits:

90 Second time limit. May sound confining, but frankly, it will probably save us all from ourselves.
150MB per video file.
Pro members only (a pro account is insanely inexpensive).

All in all it looks pretty [...]

Advanced Twitter: Hashtags

You’ve read the Twitter resources page. Or maybe your Twitter-fu is already rocking the free world: you’re tweeting left and you’re tweeing right. You’re following people who post insightful-tweets. You’re looking for the next thing to do with this whole micro-blogging thought-exchange.
Enter: Hashtags.
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