Now, the point of StumbleUpon is not to promote your own blog, but if you tag and review a number of sites, then submitting your own occasionally is okay. Even better is to get your blog readers to submit on a regular basis.There are a growing number of social bookmarking sites where bloggers and readers are frequenting to find new and interesting sites. Getting involved in these can make a huge difference in getting you and your blog noticed. Just about everyone on the internet knows the power of MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube these days. But here are a few rising stars in the social network commentating world that can help you promote your blog and you should be participating in.

– StumbleUpon is one of my favorite sharing sites. To use this one correctly you’ll need to install a toolbar on your browser. Some people have reported problems with the Internet Explorer Add-on, but I haven’t had any problem with the Firefox version. When you need a break and you have a few minutes during the day it’s fun to stumble through the recommended websites. You can set preferences to avoid topics you’re not interested in and thumbs up or down to sites you like or dislike. I think submitting sites and adding comments various sites gives you credibility when you submit blogs form your own site.

– Delicious (formerly called del.icio.us) is a social bookmarking service that started out as a site where you would store and sync your browsers bookmarks on different computers and then share them if you wish. I never really got into that because I use Foxmarks with Firefox. It just seems more secure to me. Delicious still does this but they have grown since acquired by Yahoo to be more of a tagging, saving, and sharing source. If your friends use Delicious, you can send them interesting bookmarks that they can check out the next time they log in. Of course, they can do the same for you. With a five million + user base this is one site you want to be part of.

– Digg is pretty well known now. But for those of you who don’t follow, this is a user-defined rating system of stories and blogs across the internet. One of the co-founders, Kevin Rose, also co-hosts a weekly vodcast with Alex Albrecht called Diggnation, which reviews the weekly top stories and blogs from Digg over beer and banter. This has a hard-core following of 20-something techies with deep roots in gaming. It’s become so big it’s a little hard to get noticed here. And real estate related topics are not what they are known for. Yahoo recently released Yahoo Buzz, which is trying to compete and may end up with a more mainstream following.

– Mashable is one of the largest blogs on the Internet. Mashable regularly writes about large networks like MySpace, YouTube,etc. But it also reports on less high-profile social networking sites. The website also features its own social network and is a great source of widget code and layouts.

– FriendFeed is a great way to aggregate your friends from numerous websites into one feed. You can see RSS feeds, Twitter posts, YouTube videos, Flickr photos, etc. from everyone all in chronological order. Friendfeed has a “create a room” feature, which I have not mastered yet. Dustin has been the only so kind as to invite me to his “front porch”. to share posts among friends.

– Twitter is my favorite. I have to admit I’m hooked on it. It’s the closest thing to digital crack I have ever seen. I keep telling Facebook and other friends if you really want to keep in touch, let’s Twitter. This is the fastest growing micro-blogging platform right now. I make sure and post a note about any blogs I do there. I know it brings traffic. When I post pics via TwitPic I can see how many views I get. This one is easy to use from your cell phone too. The iPhone has a great app for this called Twitterrific that you can get at the iTunes App store.

– Pownce is sort for the whos-who of micro-blogging and social networking. This was started up by Kevin Rose of Digg.com fame and has a following of his fan base. They are trying to compete head-to-head with Twitter. While they do offer some threading abilities, I prefer the fluid open nature of Twitter. If you already have friends here, you’ll like it though.

Sharing your profiles to these sites so people can find you is also critical. MyBlogLog by Yahoo is one of the most popular and you may have seen there widgets on other blogs. But I like retaggr. It makes my profiles accessible at the top of my blog posts next to the byline. It offers lots of other options too, like IM or Facebook widgets and embedding your profile on your website.

There are new sites springing up daily as social networking on the internet mushrooms. There is no way to keep up with and be a part of all of them. It’s important that you give people a way to easily share, submit, or add your blog posts to these through some kind of tagging mechanism with your blogs. I use a plug-in for Wordpress that puts network icons at the end of the post called ShareThis.

One thing is for sure. The number of options to get your blogs noticed is skyrocketing.

There is, however, the Carnival of Real Estate (this blog), the Odysseus Medal, and the REMBEX search engine, but that’s about it in the way of discovery mechanisms for real estate industry blog content.

For those of you who don’t know, I should probably explain the general concept of how Techmeme works (on a very basic level). It starts with a collection of blogs that are deemed relevant to the topic at hand. The list of trusted blogs is one method to weed out SPAM. It also weeds out extremely short articles (for example, this post by Scoble never showed up due to length). It then uses an algorithm that analyzes all the links within the list of trusted blogs to determine the most talked about topics at a given time. It’s essentially a newsfeed for the techworld. If you want a more detailed explanation, check here or here.

Update 1/6: Here’s an interesting video showing how the Techmeme home page changes over the course of 50 hours.

There are differences between the tech world and the real estate world. There are tens of thousands of tech bloggers and news sources, whereas there are only a couple thousand of real estate bloggers. The “stream” of stories on Techmeme falls down the page fairly quickly, a story hot in the morning might not even show up on the main page at the end of the day. I don’t anticipate quite the same frequency for a RE.net version. Many real estate bloggers blog about local issues — and rightfully so — which means that there aren’t as many bloggers writing about the exact same issues. There are a couple dozen bloggers who really focus on real estate industry issues. As a result, I think real estate professionals might check a “techmeme for real estate” once every 3-5 days rather than once a day as many tech geeks check Techmeme. Of course, the obsessive bloggers are going to check it every day just as obsessive tech bloggers check techmeme every 20 minutes, but the average real estate blogger who focuses on their local market would probably only need to check the site once every couple days to stay up to date on industry issues and conversations occurring in the RE.net.

I’ve gotta admit, David Gibbons and I briefly flirted with the idea of building a “RE.netMeme” as another social media marketing initiative for Zillow along the lines of Geek Estate Blog and the Carnival. We decided against it for several reasons. One, we’re already pretty busy and another social media project would take away from our core focus of helping consumers and real estate professionals better understand what Zillow is all about, both on and off Zillow. Two, we are both going to have to learn the mortgage space in preparation for launching a mortgage product sometime in 2008. And three, I heard that someone else is already working on this same project, so there was no sense duplicating the effort.

Truthfully, I don’t know which company or individual(s) is working on it. That said, if you know and are willing to share, leave an anonymous comment or e-mail me (drewm at z dot com) — I keep good secrets. While I don’t know who might be building it, I do know Todd Carpenter already has a list of over 1,000 real estate blogs driving the REMBEX search engine, so he would be in a prime position to pull this off.

So, back to the question — would the RE.net benefit from a Techmeme for real estate?

I decided it would be interesting to get Erik’s thoughts and motivations behind the new blog, so I conducted an e-mail interview with him to publish here:

Q: What inspired you and (other founders) to start this blog?

Roofable is a new real estate and neighborhood blog for the Orlando area.

As you know, I’ve been blogging about real estate for a while at RealtyThoughts.com, and because I live in Orlando I keep looking for good local real estate blogs. You see great real estate blogging communities growing up around San Francisco, Seattle, Phoenix, New York and a few other areas. I want to help that happen here in Orlando

On top of that, I run seminars on real estate blogging for the local REALTOR organization, and keep telling people that they should be doing this on the hyper-local level – they are the experts in their communities after all. I wanted to make the meta-real estate blog for Orlando and use that to grow the hyper-local real estate agent blogs that should be coming up around the area in the near future. Something like this can really grow the local blogging community.

One last thing to note is that there are certain things that real estate agents can’t talk about. I’m not a real estate agent, therefore I’m not bound by those same restrictions .

Q: What target market are you aiming to hit?

If you’re talking about real estate in Orlando, we want Roofable to be part of your conversation. Roofable is for people who are interested in their neighborhood, their homes and who want to know what’s going on locally as it relates to real estate.

An old adage is that, “politics and real estate are local.” Our goal is to eventually drop down beneath the broader Orlando level and actually help facilitate neighborhood discussions around real estate within the hyper-local community. I might live in East Orlando, so don’t really care about downtown or Winter Park. Roofable will soon start segmenting content at those levels.

Q: How are you thinking about consumer versus industry content?

This is a change-up for me, as I’ve written mostly about the real estate industry in the past. Instead, Roofable is for the consumer and thus will have more information that they will care about. Since I can’t change completely, I’m sure you’ll find me injecting a few industry opinions into the mix, but with an angle that might actually interest non-real estate professionals.

I have recruited someone with a pure consumer mindset to help me write the blog – Pam Johnson. Her ability to give us an even keel when it comes to consumer content is very important. It’s too easy for us “industry people” to veer off into insider language and topics that don’t interest anyone else.

Q: What benefits are you aiming to get out of this blog, either for yourself or your company?

I’d like to be part of the real estate conversation here in Orlando. This is a great area to live in, has strong growth and continued economic strength indicators. As more people realize that they can find the conversations online about the local market, I want to position Roofable to be the place they do that at.

Honestly, I’m not sure where the blog will go over time, or what will happen with it. Right now I’m committed to finding good interesting stories that people here want to read. Luckily I can look to some of the other great real estate bloggers who do this around the country to see what works well for them and then try and incorporate that with an Orlando twist.

Photography For Real Estate does one thing, and it does it perfectly. It tells you how to take better pictures of the homes you are marketing. The blog also gives tips on Virtual Tour products, and photo editing software.

The blog is written by Larry Lohrman, who has been involved with photography since the mid 70s, and his wife became a real estate agent in 1985. He explains his blog best, “I started this blog in 2004 after seeing other real estate agents and photographers struggle with the same problems shooting interior photography that I’ve solved over the last several years. I enjoy helping agents raise the level of their photography and discussing interior and 360 photography.”

In addition to this incredible blog, Larry has started a very active group on Flickr where you can find great examples of real estate shots. Make it a point to visit Photography For Real Estate today, and let us know how it works out for you.

In the past year, blogs have exploded onto the real estate scene as one of the “must have” items of 2007. Since this explosion, many Realtors have been starting their own blogs separate from their website using WordPress, ActiveRain, TypePad or others. Let’s face it, blogs are tough to maintain and most Realtors simply don’t have the time to maintain a second website. Having to manage their current website, market themselves online, get leads, convert leads, manage reviews, check email, manage drip campaigns, show listings, write contracts, go to a listing presentation, etc. — and then manage their new blog website on top of all that is quite a lot to ask. It’s just one more task for a very busy professional.

One of the things we’ve learned at Incredible Agent over the past six years working with Realtors is that two websites (blog and traditional agent website) are not better than one. It requires twice as much time and effort to build content, generate links and maintain your website. It’s simply a bad strategy for a busy Realtor and definitely doesn’t help with the search engine optimization. In today’s real estate world, time management is crucial. A Realtor’s website, leads, contacts, reviews, drip campaigns, email and blog should all be managed in one place so they have more time to focus on converting their leads and working with clients.

We’ve recently launched our solution to the problem. It’s a free, open-source real estate website and blogging platform for every Realtor. We’ve consolidated every aspect of a Realtor’s world onto their own website and have made it open for others to add new tools and plug-ins as needed. Our mission is to make our members the most successful Realtors on the Internet. We believe they can only do that by consolidating their efforts into one simple solution in order to save time and focus on where they really make their money, with their clients.

To learn more, you can visit Incredible Agent’s demo website. Once you’re ready to make the plunge, you can sign up as a member of Incredible Agent and create your own website in 2 minutes or less. You’ll be able to preview your website and begin adding content before you go live. When you’re ready to launch, simply point your domain over to our servers and you’ll be live within a few days.

Realtor’s don’t make their money online, they make their money offline. That will never change. Incredible Agent is hoping to help you spend less time online and more time working directly with clients.

After all, how many local residents in your community are interested in “Area events for children” or “Architecture or housing styles in your area”? I’d guess quite a few, but I’ve never see anyone write posts focusing on those topics — meaning they are likely topics you might gain SEO traffic from.

• Part 1 – Jay Thompson
• Part 2 – Greg Swann

For those that prefer text, here’s a quick summary:

Jay Thompson Summary: In his presentation Jay Thompson discusses the fundamentals of blogging and how it can be used to attract new business. He starts by addressing what a blog is and moves on to provide powerful insights into the different aspects of a successful blogging. Finally, he offers a demonstration of what an agent can expect from a dedicated blogging effort. This is a very engaging presentation with many practical tips.

Greg Swann Summary: Greg’s presentation is from a more philosophical perspective and covers issues from a higher level. He discusses the value of a blog and why having a strong Internet presence is now almost a minimum requirement. Explaining that a blog is really an extension of your personality, he offers some ideas on the different approaches of blogging themes.Many of the topics he discusses are also addressed in his new online book “Real Estate Weblogging 101″.

Greg Swann has put together A how-to book-in-weblog-form for would-be real estate webloggers. The book is largely complete, but the beauty of a digital book published using Wordpress is that it can be continually improved. With real estate bloggers popping up all over the place, this should be a great resource for those looking to become real estate webloggers.

You can view the new site here.