The point that strikes me as most important in this thread is necessity for us all to honestly address our strengths and weaknesses. Once we are able to address our weaknesses without fear are we able to move forward to correct them.

Blogging makes it interesting in that we are expected to address our weaknesses in public, which is a whole new way of conducting business.

Oh good grief.

Having to mask a URL so that your domain isn’t “realtown.com” is crazy.

“you are doing a serious disservice to your readers!”

No, he’s not Frances.

Loyalty is admirable. But even the most loyal of followers needs to be able to see, understand and articulate the shortcomings — they are ALWAYS there. Denying them is just plain silly.

BTW, the breakdown of the $18 is $10/year to the WordPress.com folks to do the domain redirect and $8/year to another host to continue to register the domain name for me. I’m pretty sure that Ardell (and many others) would be happy to pay $10/year (and probably 5X that amount!) to have a blog that worked properly under their own URLs.

I expect I am one of the most notorious for using a pointer that cloaks or masks the “real” domain name, and leads to the obvious shortcomings as a result.

But I want my blog to be http://www.SearchingSeattleBlog.com and not a “realtown” url. I separately ping the pointer domain, and my domain does fairly well in the search engines as a result. Though I believe my stats are divied up between the two domains.

I think that is what Dustin is trying to say. The solution isn’t for the url to turn back into realtown’s url when people get there using SearchingSeattleBlog. The solution is for me to be able to use SearchingSeattleblog as the domain without needing to simply use it as a pointer.

Is that correct Dustin?

I think Active Rain is working on an “outside blog” platform where members can use their own domain names. They may already have it. But that blog would be in addition to the regular AR blog, and not in place of it.

Frances, I think the real meaning of blogging is to create an honest exchange where sometimes you are right and sometimes you are wrong. While that may be counter to your job description, if you can’t sometimes admit the shortcomings, you lose credibility. I say that in an effort to assist, and not as a criticism.

To be part of Web 2.0, one must by definition accept being less than perfect almost all of the time. As Jonathan Dalton said in comment #17, to always be loyal without admitting shortcomings, defies the basic premise of blogging in the first place. Blogging must be truth vs. loyalty.

I am exceptionally loyal to RealTown, but not at the expense of truth.

You’re going to continue to ignore the obvious… aren’t you? You continue to pick at insignificant details without even trying to address the big issues.

Your blog post accusing me of getting my facts WRONG was so wrong, I’m just about ready to send you to the bathroom so that you don’t stink up the rest of 4realz anymore. Until you are willing to (1) articulate the facts that I got wrong in my original post, or (2) admit I didn’t get any facts wrong, please do not continue to leave comments on 4realz.

With that said, IC still does not have a good solution for people to host their blogs under their own domains, so of course, agents are going to look for ways around the system. If IC has stopped recommending that agents cloak their domains that is a great start, but clearly doesn’t explain why RealTown hasn’t created a better solution.

IC has never recommended uncloaked or unmasked URLs and we have repeatedly urged bloggers to uncloak and unmask URLs in e-mails, teleconferences, and Webinars.

Certainly, when bloggers set up their blogs there are things that they forget to do … like unmasking their URLs … and we have a unique ability to reach out across communities with e-mail and other venues … in fact, I just sent a friendly reminder.

Guess you could say we turned another lemon into lemonade. Thanks for the citrus treat

Your SF Condo Blog run by RealTown makes way too easy of a target, so I almost feel bad talking about it.

But let’s start with URLs… Notice that when you click around your website (sfcondomap.com) that the URL in the address bar doesn’t change. That’s just HORRIBLE hosting because it means that your URL has been cloaked.

I’ll give you an example where this may have hurt your business already. Let’s say a consumer comes to your home page (sfcondomap.com) and then wants to share your “Top 10 Dream Condos” with someone else. Well, when they click on the link to this page, the URL doesn’t change. For most users this is extremely confusing and means that you’ll probably loose out on getting that user to send you free traffic and links to your site.

Assuming that IC recommended this solution (they’ve recommended it to other bloggers), then it means your hosting provider (in this case IC) is playing off of your inexperience to give you an easy solution that is clearly not adequate. I can tell you from experience that neither WordPress nor ActiveRain would recommend creating such a bad consumer experience for their users.

I realize that often these solutions where IC bloggers are masking the URL of their websites are not IC fault at all because anyone could cloak any site. However, IC is well aware that their ULR solution is inadequate because their users have been cloaking their websites/blogs for over two years and, as best I can tell, they’ve never provided an adequate solution to this problem.

Anyway, Scott, I could go into a few other glaring problems with the RealTown Blog blog platform, but I’ll save those for another day.