by gill4kleuren

Community events like the Carnival of Real Estate and the Odysseus Medal are, on the surface, great ways to share new blog posts and highlight great writing from within the real estate blogosphere.

But let’s be honest for a second, the real value to all of these efforts is that they are great linkbait and help generate inbound links to your blog. Here’s how it goes… Publisher sends links out with the posts of the week, authors link back announcing the link post is live, and around and around it goes every week. Everybody boosts their Technorati authority, everybody gets to sip on the Google Juice.

I’ve participated in these to a small degree in the past, but haven’t spent much effort recently. Mostly because I’m lazy and it’s usually late on Sunday night (and past the submission deadlines) before I remember to submit anything.

But I wonder how effective these link parties will be now that Google Declares Jihad On Blog Link Farms. From Techcrunch:

A major Google page rank update has punished large scale blog link farms and similar sites indulging in heavy cross linking by dramatically cutting their Google page rank scores.

Some pretty major blogs were penalized in this latest adjustment of the PageRank algorithm, sites like Engadget and Autoblog. And while this go round was primarily targeting the big blog networks, I wonder how long it is till Google shifts its sights to traffic boosting efforts like the carnivals.

At the very least, it seems to me that bloggers are going to have to be a bit more judicious in their linking behavior moving forward. It seems like Big Brother really is watching.

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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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Carnival. Matrix. Go.

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On the upside, The Carnival of Real Estate is at BlueRoof Blog this week. Lots of good reading to kick off your Monday morning. Congratulations must go to Todd Tarson of MOCO Real Estate News who was chosen as pick of the week. My post Web Marketing 101: Keeping Track of Your Visitors was also chosen as one of the six top picks – thanks Greg for all your hard work!

Next week the Carnival’s over at Matrix, a fantastic real estate blog by Jonathan J. Miller, which if you’re not already reading – stop everything and go and check it out. For a very sobering assessment of the US real estate market (and a bit of a downer), read today’s post Giving A Hard Look At A Hard Landing.

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I hope everyone had a great Labor Day long weekend. I just returned from a visit to my hometown of Vancouver, Canada – a beautiful city where real estate discussion is not just a pastime but a full contact sport.

Catching up on my newsreader and email, despite a last long weekend, it was anything but quiet in the real estate blogosphere…

Probaly the biggest news was that the Rain City Guide was hacked. Kudos go to Dustin who must have worked his tail off to get the site up and running again (I’m sure that’s just what he wanted to be doing on a sunny long weekend) and he gives us 10 Great Reasons NOT to use WordPress… in response.

This experience certainly should give any blogger pause for thought. But it’s not enough to move me off WP. I’ve run my personal blog on a number of alternative Content Management Systems (CMS) in the past, including both Mambo and Joomla and while they are all great products, they are really not setup as a great blogging platform. And, in my experience, Mambo was even more prone to security problems. Wordpress, despite its flaws, is still the blogging leader. That said, I will be reviewing my site’s security settings to prevent a similar situation developing here.

Before RCG went down however, Robbie gave us a great post “I am Tiger Woodsâ€? – which provided a good developer’s view of the Real Estate 2.0 playing field. His Zearch tool, which you can find on the RCG, is one of the more innovative, if a little unpolished, real estate search tools out there – so it was nice to hear his perspective on where things stand.

Of course the other big news from over the weekend was the NY Times piece on Redfin (Does anybody have a link to the complete story? The NY Times site has gone subscriber only). Greg Sterling weighed in with his thoughts and even heavyweight blogger Jeff Jarvis chimed in on the subject. Verbal fisticuffs flew over the piece, prompting some great discussion, with Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman himself even jumping into the fray.

A couple more posts that caught my eye too:

• sellsius blog’s 10 Ways To Keep Your Blog Posts Out of Limbo summed up a lot of good ideas, as I’ve been giving this problem a lot of thought recently. My solution was to use the WP plugin ‘The Feature‘ to highlight particularly noteworthy posts. You can see those posts on the right column under Featured Posts.
• The Phoenix Real Estate Guy also gives us a great picture of a New Marketing Strategy…

Finally, The Carnival of Real Estate is now up at Nubricks.com – so I’ll have a ton more reading to catch up on there.

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This week’s Carnival of Real Estate is live. Go check it out at PineNeedleLawn…

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