Would the Real Estate Blogosphere (RE.net) Benefit from a “Techmeme for Real Estate”?
By: Drew Meyers Zillow.com | January 4, 2008
Techmeme is a site I visit daily when I get home from work, and occassionally at work, to see what’s going on in the tech world. There’s almost always something interesting to read and it allows me to very quickly get a sense of what the hottest technology topics are and who is writing about them. memeorandum does the same for the political web. There’s Ballbug for baseball. Megite uses the same concept for a variety of topics. However, nothing of its kind exists for the RE.net.
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?
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Comments
13 Comments so far
Greg Swann on January 4, 2008 11:49 pm
Tom Royce — TheRealEstateBloggers.com — has talked about doing this for quite some time.
I’ve also considered building a feed bot of Odysseus Medal nominess — the long list — echoed as they are nominated. This would satisfy much of what you’re looking for, since the long list is pretty comprehensive.
Note that I would be very concerned if Zillow had anything more than a fan-like enthusiasm for anything like this. GeekEstate.com has worked out fairly well, but Rome works best when power is widely dispersed.
Todd Carpenter on January 5, 2008 12:45 am
I’m not smart enough to make that. I’m also not sure it it would translate. With the rise of group blogs, most local re bloggers are posting industry stuff on one of a dozen or so blogs, all of which are in my feed reader. Maybe I don’t get it?
Greg Swann on January 5, 2008 2:55 am
> I’ve also considered building a feed bot of Odysseus Medal nominess — the long list — echoed as they are nominated. This would satisfy much of what you’re looking for, since the long list is pretty comprehensive.
Amending this. I went ahead and did this. I’m populating it now, and I have software to populate it by push-button going forward. It’s widgetable for other sites. I’ll write about it in the morning.
It’s not Techmeme, but we’re not big enough for Techmeme anyway.
Tony on January 5, 2008 12:53 pm
“The list of trusted blogs is one method to weed out SPAM.”
A closed set of “trusted blogs” is one of the biggest complaints about Techmeme. Over time, the barrier to entry gets higher and higher into what can become a rather incestuous set of same-old same-old opinions. IIRC, even scoble has complained about this (part of the rationale for his link blog)
Tony
Drew Meyers on January 6, 2008 10:28 am
Tony-
I agree that a “trusted” list is not ideal in all cases since it’s sometimes hard for the little guy to make the list, but I do think it’s better than the likely alternative of having the site overtaken by spam.
Todd Carpenter on January 6, 2008 7:53 pm
Filtering out spam, and sites that are long dead is the only filter I apply.
Drew Meyers on January 6, 2008 8:05 pm
That’s all that is really needed in the way of filters for the RE.net I think. There just needs to be a way for new re bloggers to get included fairly easily.
Tony Bauer on January 15, 2008 7:43 am
But then, even tech news keeps changing through the day and yet there is a collection of really good resources out there. This shows how successful Techmeme is in its implementation. If there were the right minds behind it, a real estate directory of resources would be just as successful. The main issue as is rightly pointed out is the problem of spam and proper security.
Chris Dowell on January 16, 2008 8:24 pm
Great idea. I hope someone takes off with the idea and runs with it. There are enough real estate bloggers to pull it off.
Jason Brown on January 17, 2008 7:28 am
Having some minimum guidelines is not asking too much. Maybe just slightly difficult parameters for inclusion would do the trick.
Chris Heath on January 26, 2008 1:36 am
The bigger a site gets they will always find a way to squeeze the small guy out, but that what blogging about isn’t it?
Jason Brown on January 26, 2008 9:15 am
Is blogging about squeezing out the small guy? I don’t really see it that way.
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