I thought it was interesting when he recently took a shot at Rich Barton and Pete Flint (twice), but my jaw dropped when I started reading his post criticizing (to put it nicely) Move’s opperation of Realtor.com.
Dustin's Angels
nice… gotta love the Angels! Was really nice to meet you in San Francisco.
It was great to meet you as well… so much fun to put a face to the name.
I guess blogging does have its rewards.
Nice
This is real advantage of Blogging
Wow, I didn’t realize you were such a stud. 
It’s all about the relationships I guess..so in the name of blogging!
What a GREAT photo!
It was (and ALWAYS is) great to see Dustin. And meeting ARDELL (and Kim, and Rhonda and, and and) was a highlight of the trip!
LOL…
Dustin, you da man!
You Americans can make anything sexy – even real estate blogging!
-Andrew
AKA the Canuck Condo Guy
oops! Looks like the photo didn’t transfer over w/your wordpress transition…although I’m pretty sure I know which photo this is. 
…than Trulia and Zillow combined.”
Can’t wait to check back in 2 years!
It will be a lot of hard work but I think we’ll get there. Check out this graph: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/zillow.com+trulia.com+city-data.com/?metric=uv&months=12
City-data.com is a site similar to Localism in the way that it generates traffic from long tail search queries. Localism will have an advantage over city-data in the way it uses UGC.
I’ve been liking quantcast data even more lately and their chart is even more striking.
Nonetheless, you’re still running a site that gets substantially less traffic than any of the sites mentioned…
If my brief sampling is any guide – I hope it isn’t – a fair portion of the Localism’s traffic will be from copyright lawyers making notes on pirated articles and photos.
One of the popular neighborhoods I looked at in Chicago had “Top neighbors” in Florida nad a suburb 50 miles otuside the city, and no relevant content whatsoever.
…great for a variety of reasons, don’t expect to use a corp blog to drive consumer traffic.
…RE Connect, I’ve gotten the most questions about the project management tool I mentioned called BaseCamp. It’s a great tool I’ve been using to manage toDo lists, milestones, messages, etc, with small groups of people (i.e. clients). I’ve tried some of the others in the space, like Zoho Projects, but nothing is as simple to use.
If you’re going to try out BaseCamp, click on a link from this post and I’ll get a little kickback if you sign up for one of their pay products (and they have a free option that lets you test out the tool!), although I’d write this post even if they didn’t offer an afflilate program because BaseCamp really is that good.
Hey Dustin, we use Basecamp (have been for quite a while now) and agree that it’s such a great tool! So easy to use, great for making sure groups of people are all on the same page with respect to a project and love the milestone reminders it sends out to the owner of a task. Great call out.
I hear you Dave… Interestingly, I was using it at my engineering company 3+ years ago and it really hasn’t changed all that much… Sometimes tools keep adding features until they get complicated to easily use, but BaseCamp has never had that issue.
It’s unbelievable how many competitors Basecamp is facing every single week. There are similar products emerging every week out of nowhere.
That’s true, PM hut. Basecamp has got lots of competitors. We’re one of them – Wrike. The reason why there are so many services out there is that there’s no one single recipe for a project. Basecamp doesn’t fit everybody, thought it’s a good tool. Some teams start with Basecamp, and then switch to Wrike, when they grow bigger. Wrike is a tool for another level of doing business. It shines in multi-project environment. Zoho has its own advantages too. So my point is that every manager should evaluate different options before adoption a tool.
You do a tremendous job at utilizing social media to assist your real estate status. Keep it up!
…the folks I talked with at RE Connect were pretty underwhelmed.
… CribQ’s rental search with their own data.
alicemclane, 
Russell Shaw 12:26 am on August 1, 2008 Permalink |
I don’t know him but I am pretty impressed with him so far – after reading that post. Thanks for pointing me to it.
Dustin 12:53 am on August 1, 2008 Permalink |
Russell: By way of background, he is a founder of ActiveRain…
Jim Duncan 3:42 am on August 1, 2008 Permalink |
He makes some excellent points. The problem may be the bureaucratic structure of NAR; getting them to do anything before the market turns, whether that’s in 6 or 36 months could prove impossible.
Jonathan Washburn 4:36 pm on August 1, 2008 Permalink |
Glad I gave you a thrill Dustin. I would disagree about two shots being thrown at Zillow and Trulia. The second post was a shot more aimed at the lack of effort being put out by real estate’s old guard than it was a follow up shot at Trulia and Zillow.
Joseph Bridges 1:20 pm on August 12, 2008 Permalink |
I enjoyed his post about Realtor.com. I do believe that they could better serve the real estate industry in their offerings and the price being offered to realtors. Jonathan makes a point about buying the assests but I think more importantly about NAR looking out for members in the offerings at realtor.com. We have found in our testing that money spent on realtor.com produces far fewer results than those spent on our own websites.