I’m back in Portland and done washing off three days worth of casino stink. NAR was an enlightening trip and it was great to catch up with so many people, even if a broken plane sunk my hopes of attending the BloggerCon get-together.

Over the few days I was in Vegas I had a chance to talk to a number of people. I spoke front of a panel at the Homescape Summit, as well as presented to an enlightened group of Realty Alliance marketers and technologists. I also had numerous in-hallway conversations, where – let’s face it – the real education happens.

Here’s my take. There’s a seismic shift in Real Estate 2.0 underway right now.

The fear of new technology has largely dissipated. But it has been replaced by confusion and hesitation in the face of an uncertain market.

What do I mean? I think most people get Web 2.0 – they understand the power of a blog or a social network, for example. They understand the value of syndicating their listings. They know they should be thinking about video tours for their listings. The what? and why? questions have, for the most part, been answered. It’s the how? that they’re wrestling with more and more now.

As far as announcements this week, there were some significant developments; Zillow snagged some listings from the newspapers and introduced a Virtual Sold Sign program.

Rival REALTOR.com launched a neighborhood research tool for consumers. And CyberHomes has finally birthed itself.

I hope to chime in with a greater assessment of each of the announcements next week, but here’s something I’ll be chewing on over the weekend.

In the frenetic arms race by the portals for greater and deeper feature sets, does any of this really create a better experience for the users?

This mad dash for features has been driven by the dreams of untethered engineers, fast-tracked by the fears of being left out of the party and fueled by a need to prove a positive growth strategy for venture backers and shareholders. But, in the end, what does it all add up to?

The greater challenge here moving forward is not just the next gearing up for the next big release or more games of oneupmanship, but is going to be educating Realtors, and by extension, the general public, on how to use them.

Right now, I think this focus on features has lead to overwhelming confusion that is resulting in hesitation. The shift that has to happen is the move from the development of technology to the application of technology. The company that can best communicate the application of its product will win, not the company with the flashiest features.

Or at least, that’s what I’m hearing.

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Kicking off a busy week at the National Association of Realtors conference in Las Vegas, here’s my interview with Dale Stinton, CEO of NAR.

I’ll be attending the BloggerCon get-together tomorrow night at the Venetian, so I look forward to seeing many of you there. Big thanks to Daniel Rothamel at the RealEstateZebra for organizing it.

I’ll also be hanging out at the Incredible Agent booth for the Meet the Bloggers event on Wednesday. I’ll be there at 2 to 3pm, so make sure you swing by and say hello.

Finally, I expect posting to be light on FOREM due to a pretty hectic schedule, but you will be able to follow my Twitters at the NAR Updates blog.

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With NARdi Gras kicking off tomorrow, NAR has gone all out to support Bloggers this year in New Orleans. So far they seem to have responded.

Dustin Luther, Rain City Guide Godfather has unveiled a new blog over at Move.com where he’ll be liveblogging NARdi Gras.

Paul Chaney from Blogging Systems is liveblogging as well. I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on both of these blogs over the coming days.

As we did for the earlier Inman Connect SF conference, I’d suggest any of the bloggers attending the event tag their posts on Technorati with the tag nardigras so we can begin to aggregate coverage of the event for all of us non-attendees. Similarly, I’d suggest any companies making announcements down in New Orleans also tag their announcements with this same tag as well.

Paul has also started uploading some photos from the conference to flickr and has tagged them with the tag nardigras (RSS). It would be great if others did likewise.

Finally, I’ve put together a FeedRaider Aggregator page that pulls all of these feeds together and presents them on a single page for you to digest. As with all FeedRaider sites, you can keep on top of the developments either as a single deck or as a chronological river of news.

NAR really should have done something this themselves – but I guess there’s always next year. While they’ve made great strides accommodating bloggers on site this year, they should be just as accommodating to those of us following developments from afar.

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