Due to lack of interest we will be suspending realtortech.org for the time being. If you happen to read this post and are interested in contributing, please contact Stevie or Mike. It will remain on the net till about April 2009 so for the time being it will be available for reference. Thanks…

Hey social media types: Thought y’all (or more specifically, your members) might be interested in knowing about a new blogging benchmarking survey that we’re running at VARbuzz.com.

The Center for Real Estate and Social Technologies (CREST) is a new research and education program for REALTORS® who use social media in their business. CREST’s first initiative is a research survey that seeks to answer some of the most commonly asked questions about real estate blogging:

• What’s the average number of comments on a post?
• How many posts do REALTORS® write per month, on average?
• What’s the most common blogging platform?
• How many RSS subscribers does the average real estate blog have?
• And much, much more!

If you know of any REALTOR® bloggers in your neck of the woods, please send them to VARbuzz to take the survey. Also, if your communications department would be willing to announce this survey to your members, I’d be happy to provide them with a copy of the aggregate results and the executive summary when it’s ready. It will make for a very interesting story for your blogging agents and brokers!

Contact me with questions ben at varealtor dot com.

Sometimes I run across an idea that, despite being terrible, is/was still really popular (parachute pants, the Macarena, Dane Cook). Then there are the ideas that ARE truly great AND are popular (the transistor, antiseptics, Grand Theft Auto). Then there are the ideas that are truly great but just don’t quite catch on… ShiftSpace is one of those. Now I know this blog is more about posting usable info that will help us in our jobs, and ShiftSpace doesn’t fit that bill. But it’s such an interesting idea that I can’t help but write about it.
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So I know there are tons of video sharing sites out there, and even a few that are specific to real estate, but I’m going to make a shameless plug for a crew that’s local to us in Massachusetts… hey California, you’re not the only one with technology start-ups!

Check out www.zipvo.com

They are on the all-free, ad-supported model. They’ve got the features everyone loves about youtube; link-to or embed a clip on you site, etc. It’s good stuff, so if you’ve got a “tech-tips” kinda thing in your newsletter, or on you site, they might be something work checking on and informing your members about.

Yes yes, there are tons of “real estate glossaries” and other sites that define the most commonly-used real estate terms, but most of them are antiquated laundry lists cobbled together from other laundry lists. I was sent this site, RealEstateWiki.com, which is pretty interesting. It could, like so many other niche sites, fall flat on its face or just die a slow and obscure death of disuse. But it is the only site I know of that makes use of the wiki platform to create a pretty expansive glossary, FAQs, and whitepages specific to real estate. It’s the brainchild of Stefan Swanepoel, a touring real estate educator who apparently has altruistic motives for the site; it’s all free with no advertising or other fees to use. It could grow into something useful.

http://www.RealEstateWiki.com.

Google’s App Engine is cool. Really cool. It’s not a revolutionary step for them, but rather another front in their march toward true “cloud” computing. In brief, let me explain what the Apps Engine is… Google has opened up their infrastructure to any developer who wants to create and host a web app on their servers. This removes the need for a developer to pay for servers, hosting, and setup of a LAMP/XAMPP environment. In my opinion, anything that lowers the barrier to entry in the delivery of services is a great thing.

So how does this move us toward cloud computing?
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Ok, so Stevie and I were talking about the blog and decided we should make a quick “How-To” for those who haven’t had much experience with the mechanics of blog posting.

So, since videos are worth roughly 24,000 words per second (15,000 per second for standard web video), this is much faster than a written explanation.

So I’m on a list of old Austin, TX cohorts that swap info very similar to what we talk about on the Illinois listserve - and here as well, so get to posting, people! Anyway, one of the list members who’s quite the security guru wrote up a very comprehensive paper on security concepts. It’s really in-depth, but has a little something for everyone.

http://www.subspacefield.org/security/security_concepts.html

I thought this might be good reading for those interested in the subject. For those not interested…. well, it will either spark your interest or provide a great cure for insomnia.

If you’re like me you have some users that love to send the largest possible files through email. They might say things like “my email to so-and-so keeps bouncing back”, neglecting to mention the 20Mb attachment that’s really a video of a skateboarding dog or a surfing squirrel. Not that skateboarding dogs aren’t important… far from it.

So, rather than FTP their file somewhere and give them a link, I send them here: http://www.mediafire.com/
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Hi all, Mike here. I’m going to use this email I wrote for everyone as the meat of my first post. I hope people can find use in it. As with anything involving software, hardware, and technobabble, you won’t really be able to wrap your head around the concepts until you try it for yourself - and experimenting on your own - to build your confidence. I can’t stress that enough. You won’t hurt anything by curiously clicking icons and flipping switches in the software to see what they do… but you should still save often, just to be safe

So,with that said, here’s the summary I wrote a while ago with some info on both simple and advanced ways to put together a podcast. I included additional info on recording phone interviews, and I’ll make an additional post later with tips on software processing (compression, EQing, etc). There are also a few good tutorial links at the bottom, and you can always go on youtube and search for “audacity tutorial” to get a ton of training info on the recording software.
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