A Few Things That Caught My Eye
Paul Chaney over at Blogging Systems Blog points out a great post by Chris Roush from Arizona State’s National Center for Business Journalism on why real estate reporters should be blogging. Why? He says it much better than me…
Blogging is where real estate reporting should be headed. It allows you the immediacy of communicating with your audience on an almost instantaneous basis, and it also allows you the leeway to write about real estate in a way that the traditional newspaper format doesn’t.
The good folks at Inman have jumped on the cluetrain already, but I love to see some more of the mainstream media head in this direction as well.
I love my Dashboard Widgets. So I was stoked to see Zillow recently released a Zestimates Widget – too bad it’s only for Yahoo!. Where’s the OSX version guys? From their blog:
You can also make a specific home your default and have its Zestimate loaded into the widget each time you start your computer. And get this:
You can even set it so you get an audio version of the Zestimate.
That’s pretty cool. But I suspect it might get annoying quickly.
Hey, Google rolled out a ‘Custom Search Engine’ today. You can host it on your own site or point to a unique home page – so of course, I built a real estate blog search engine. Check it out. I’m going to playing with this further over the next couple of days and report on this more in depth.
Finally, it’s Monday so it’s Carnival time – this time up at HotPads Daily.
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3 Comment(s)
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- From Lam chops: More links back to the self-motivating conversation . . . | BloodhoundBlog | The weblog of BloodhoundRealty.com in Phoenix, Arizona | Oct 25, 2006
- From A Few Things That Caught My Eye - Google Services - Google Custom Search Engine - Researching Google | Oct 27, 2006
Drew M from Zillow | Oct 24, 2006 | Reply
Joel-
I’m glad you like the Yahoo! Widget. I just wanted to mention that there is a Google Gadget as well. Here is the blog post about it- http://www.zillowblog.com/zillow_blog/2006/09/google_gadget.html. Keep up the good work!
Kevin | Oct 26, 2006 | Reply
Google’s custom search engine is pretty neat. It must bite into their revenue for the Google Search Appliance, though. Having said that, since ads are 99% of their business, I’m sure they’re more than happy to cannibalize the 1% if need be.
The only problem I see with the concept is that Google.com’s index (as opposed to Blogsearch.google.com’s index) isn’t usually very up to date on the contents of blogs. That’s why I haven’t, for the time being, used the “Google Search” widget on my blog.
Kevin | Oct 26, 2006 | Reply
Google’s custom search engine is pretty neat. It must bite into their revenue for the Google Search Appliance, though. Having said that, since ads are 99% of their business, I’m sure they’re more than happy to cannibalize the other 1% if need be.
The only problem I see with the concept is that Google.com’s index (as opposed to Blogsearch.google.com’s index) isn’t usually very up to date on the contents of blogs. That’s why I haven’t, for the time being, used the “Google Search” widget on my blog.