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Why we built this weblog, and why it’s going to work: Understanding weblogging as the Web 2.0 software paradigm best suited to documenting our transition to flexmls
By: Greg Swann,
BloodhoundBlog.com
Posted: Tuesday, October 9th, 2007, 5:02 am MST
Category: General Information
The impetus for building this weblog came from the Phoenix real estate weblogging community — which is to say the owners of the weblogs you see listed in the blogroll on the sidebar. I was the first to suggest it, but that was an accident of timing. The idea of addressing a problem like this with a weblog is native to the way we think. We live in the Web 2.0 world, and, as much as people might want to dismiss the Web 2.0 idea as marketing bunk, we see ourselves as swimming in a completely different ocean from either the static Web 1.0 world or the painfully slow, antique world of paper.
We gloat to the world that Phoenix is the epicenter of real estate weblogging, which is almost certainly true if you are careful to ignore New York and Seattle. San Diego, at least, can pound sand! It remains that Phoenix has a greater than average concentration of real estate webloggers who are both widely known and very technically adept. I won’t say that we necessarily “get” the Web 2.0 idea better than real estate webloggers in other cities, but our efforts have certainly led us to be very vocal on what we want and don’t want from real estate technology vendors.
What is Web 2.0? In a post at BloodhoundBlog, I wrote:
In an elevator speech: Web 2.0 creates an ongoing community of active users by integrating a user-modifiable database through an interactive, as opposed to static, web-based interface.
Think of Ebay, where I can list something for sale, and you can interact with me by questions and comments, and then ultimately rate my performance as a vendor. Wikipedia is another great example, a vast encyclopedia as a shared creation of volunteers. Weblogging, of course, is another perfect example: The essence of weblogging is new content, such as I am adding with this post, with you being able to amend that content by posting your comments.
This is very different from a static web page, which is much like a paper document expressed in phosphors. It is what it is, and it can be very useful, but a static web site cannot create a community of users because there is nothing for users to do, no enduring change they can make to the site, either alone or in company. A weblog engenders a conversation, and that conversation is the reason for the weblog’s existence.
And this is why, when thinking of how to celebrate, promote, support, explain and explore the advent of the flexmls system, our thoughts would run immediately to a weblog. It’s the perfect medium to effect this kind of conversation. We can post and comment to the weblog as we explore ideas. When we get to a point where we have a canonical understanding of some topic, we can create a special kind of weblog entry that WordPress (the underlying weblogging software) calls a Page. They couldn’t have picked a term more vague, but a Page is like a static web page that still permits easy editing and commenting. Our About page is a Page, and the Real Estate Weblogging 101 weblog is a virtual book about real estate weblogging built entirely from Pages. FBS Systems President Michael Wurzer is fond of the wiki style of documenting information, and this is something we might consider in the future.
But there is more to the Web 2.0 idea than different software design paradigms. We all of us live and work in lots of different social groups, each one organized its own way. But in the Web 2.0 world we tend to think in terms of ad hoc, amorphous organizations. So we decided on a domain name by trading emails last Friday as a sort of committee of the interested. I bought the domains and built the site, first because BloodhoundRealty.com controls a dedicated file server, so there was no added hosting cost, and second because I can build a new weblog very quickly. Jay Thompson, Cathleen Collins and I have superuser powers, but that’s because we have more experience with WordPress at the blood-’n'-guts level. The list of contributors on the About page is presented in random order to express the leaderless nature of an enterprise like this.
But the essence of everything is the conversation. As end-users. we definitely want to have this conversation. Only half of our frustration with vendors comes from defects in their products. The other, more galling half comes about because they are so very ostentatiously not listening to our complaints. As persistent, habituated, recidivist webloggers, we swim in an ocean where vendors routinely take us seriously. They may not give us everything we ask for, but they will always give us the consideration of a good reason why they can’t — or at least can’t right now.
It would be a simple thing to conclude that vendors respond to us because weblogging amplifies our voices where paper-based letters of complaint never could. That may be true in some cases, but the vendors we like best are people just like us, people who themselves live in the Web 2.0 world and expect that everything will work in just the same way that we expect things to work. They are not them, they are us, and sometimes we do business together and sometimes we share joys and sorrows with each other.
Michael Wurzer comes from our world, the Web 2.0 world, which is why I have such faith in him. I know that he welcomes this conversation, which is not to suggest that every topic we take up will go his way. But he knows that good ideas will emerge from this process. Some of them will improve his company’s software now, some later, and probably a great many will never be implemented at all. But the end-users — that’s us — will know that FBS cares enough to listen to us and to implement as many of our ideas as it can. What’s in it for them? A happy, enthusiastic user-base — composed of people who are constantly coming up with new ideas to put flexmls that much further out of reach of its competition.
You could say that we’re buying Michael’s software with our dues money and he is buying our dues money with his software. This is a very traditional idea of a commercial relationship. But in the Web 2.0 world, we know that talking to each other will make the relationship more satisfying and more secure on both sides. He’s not simply the vendor. We’re not simply the users. We’re working together to make something much better than either party could make working alone.
As for ARMLS, it’s possible they are negotiating with us for now as though we were a tribe of friendly aliens — thrillingly bizarre but apparently harmless. They’re excited that we’re so excited, but one of our jobs is to show them — and to show the ARMLS membership as a whole — why our approach to a problem like this is better, why the Web 2.0 style of conversation will result in a better, easier, more pleasant transition for everyone involved.
We learn to walk by walking. We learn to swim by swimming. The Phoenix Real Estate Technology Exchange exists not just to help the ARMLS membership make the switch to flexmls, but also to help Realtors and other real estate professionals in the Phoenix-area make the mental switch to swimming in the vast oceans of information that real estate webloggers already take for granted. The content of this weblog is important, but the weblog itself is an essential expression of that content. We’re not effecting a transition to flexmls, we’re helping 40,000 ARMLS members learn to swim the oceans of Web 2.0, embracing flexmls along the way.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
October 9th, 2007 at 6:55 am
Perfect.
October 9th, 2007 at 10:00 am
What a fabulous and accurate YouTube illustration!
October 9th, 2007 at 1:18 pm
I love that video - I linked to it back in March when Robert Scoble came to town as a presenter for a conference titled “Social Media - the Revolution in Marketing” and spoke. It was my launch into social media and blogging.
I immediately got why this medium is prefect for real estate too - the social aspect of the home buying process is linked to people; there will always be a niche for online brokerages, but by and large, one-on-one interaction is what real estate consumers still look for at the end of the day.