This is the third article in our three-part series with tips and suggestions for making your real estate blogging easier using common writing formulas.

See Items 1-7 in Twenty-One Easy Blog Posts for Your Real Estate Blog, Part I.

Items 8-14 are in Twenty-One Easy Blog Posts for Your Real Estate Blog, Part II.

We now conclude with items 15-21. Readers, if there are other formulas that you use to make your writing easier, please share them in the comments section and if we get enough of them we’ll publish a follow-on article based on your input!

15. The Feed Bag / Link Karma / Week In Review Post
    Athol Kay has an occasional post he writes, the Feed Bag, which is just a few links out to articles of interest. Brian Clark at Copyblogger does the same thing, and often under the title “Link Karma”. I have a long winded series that I run here, The Real Estate Internet Marketing Week In Review, which essentially does the same thing with some commentary thrown in.What I’ve found from the Week in Review is that these articles can actually take some time to write if you’re not keeping up on your reading, and the reading and surfing can be somewhat labor intensive. Because of this, I would think twice before making this a regular series, but if your feed reader has a lot of blogs in it you may find it easier to bang these out.A tip from my weekly series: I tag articles I want to remember with the date for that week’s article on my del.icio.us account. To make this easy to do with one click, I’ve installed the del.icio.us browser extension (see the Firefox or Internet Explorer version).
     
16. The Colleague Shout Out
    This is similar to the blog article response piece, but focuses on the individual colleague or perhaps their whole site rather than on a particular blog post or point of view. Maybe they linked to you and you just want to say thank you and do a short write-up linking back to their site. Or maybe they just really have a great search tool for the greater Possum Ridge area, and you wanted to tell the world.
     
17. X Web Sites That Can Help You Y
    For our purposes, X is a number and Y is something that your readers would want to do that’s related to finding, selling, or owning a home. This variation on the How To article could be anything from “Five Fabulous Home Improvement Web Sites” to “Possum Ridge Sheriff’s Office Crime Maps”. Or how about a list of school web sites, or school district web sites. At the national level, sites like CLTA.ORG, where buyers can shop title insurance rates, are a great consumer resource and show you’re looking out for your clients’ bottom line.
     
18. The New Listing Post
    To my way of thinking, this is a no-brainer, at least to people who recognize it to be a no-brainer by virtue of having a brain. (Yes, sorry if that’s a bit controversial and ad hominem). If you have a listing, your seller has hired you to expose it to the world, so flaunt it! Vflyer.com has a free service (with a low-cost ad-free upgrade available) to create beautiful online flyers you can use. Posting your flyers will give you HTML you can copy as is into your blog post. To see some examples of how these look, check see for example the Elite Properties VFlyer site.
     
19. The Best Deal In Possum Gulch
    (…Or Squirrel Peak, or Cougar City, or whatever other town you sometimes work in). This is a formula I’ve wanted to use for some time, but never got around to actually implementing. Meantime an agent in my market area, DeeDee Riley, recently reminded me of this unkept promise to myself by doing an excellent job with this formula on her Realtown Blog. The idea behind this formula is to write about homes that are priced well (check price per square foot in the MLS) and that show well (from your own touring with clients or previewing).A possible limitation of this approach is that you have to be aware of MLS rules about advertising other peoples’ listings if you use this formula, so you may want to talk it over with your broker first. On the other hand, most listing agents would undoubtedly give you permission if you call them.
     
20. The Featured Neighborhood Post
    Featuring neighborhoods (or subdivisions) is a great way to capitalize on so-called “long tail” search results. In other words, by talking about specific neighborhoods, you reach readers who are interested in a very specific area for one reason or another. If you do it consistently, you have an opportunity to position yourself as something of a “neighborhood expert” in that area. Starting from scratch, your MLS can serve as a guide to when the homes were built, what they’re selling for now, price history, inventory, etc., etc. These are easier posts to put together. More ambitious posts could include interviews with residents or the like.
     
21. The List Format
    Like the How To post, this is a general blogging formula so tried and true that it bears mentioning in this contest. How about “Twenty-One Easy Blog Posts for Your Real Estate Blog” — hey, that’s this article! Or think about David Letterman’s famous top 10 list. Can you use this format to write a humorous article of your own, perhaps with some local interest. A How-To article can also be in list format, as can practically anything else you can think of. “Five Great Local Neighborhoods” is a variation on the Featured Neighborhood Post.Of course, any list can be as long as you want it to be, but some of the tried and true numbers that are often used are Three, Seven, Ten, Twenty-One, and 101. Longer and more useful lists can serve as great link bait (oh sorry, was that a hint?), but of course, they’re harder to write.

I’ve just installed Chris Fink’s Feed Statistics Plugin to test it out here after finding yet another group of RSS screen scrapers stealing the content of another blog of mine.

OK, I realize that for many of my readers I probably skipped a whole bunch of technical steps and background info there, so let me fill in.

As many of you know, RSS Feeds are a kind of machine readable version of your blog. The fact that they’re machine readable means that folks can subscribe to them in an RSS reader, like Bloglines or Google Reader for example.

Here’s a video that breaks it down if all this is greek to you so far.

Most blogging systems have a feed you can subscribe to like this. Your ActiveRain blog has one for example. (Scroll down and look for little links on the bottom right that say “RSS” or “Atom” — those are links to two flavors of RSS feed for your ActiveRain blog).

OK, well now fast forward. If people who read blogs are gradually learning how to do this, eventually people who write blogs going to want to find out how many subscribers they have, and how many times people click through to their site. Enter Feedburner.com, a free site that will “burn” a new feed — which means it’ll take your original feed that doesn’t have support for statistics and turn it into a new feed that DOES have support for statistics. Now you can find out that your article about Possum Gulch Luxury Homes was hugely successful, and bask in the sheer glory of it while writing more articles about that.

So far so good. You have your feed on Feedburner, and you’re finding out what a Possum Gulch superstar you are. All’s well and good. But what if you don’t want your feed hosted on a third party web site? For example, what if (like me) you find out that someone has taken your feed and published all your content somewhere else, but because your feed is now on Feedburner, there’s no good technical way to shut them down. (Of course, there are legal solutions because clearly it’s a copyright violation, but it’d be nice if you could shut them down another way — which you could do if the feed were hosted on your own site, but how you do that is a whole different story, with the short answer being: “ask a nerd”).

Bottom line, because of some disreputable criminals, I have to jump through hoops.

Isn’t the Internet great?

Find Ways to Use These Groaning Resources

It’s time for the Week In Review, so I’ll publish Part III of Twenty-One Easy Real Estate Blog Posts on Monday. 

This week I found a new tool to help me gather my Week In Review links, Awasu (Gesundheit!).  Awasu is a very slick — if, at times, somewhat buggy — RSS feed reader for Windows.  I’ll probably have an in depth review in a future post. 

Pet peeve time:  People who use "Blog" to mean a single post on a Blog.  These are no doubt the same people who say Real-a-tor.

This week’s Web 2.0 "There Must Be Something We Can Do With All These Web Sites" award goes to John Jantsch at Duct Tape Marketing for his brief Let’s Get More Social article.  Sometimes I think Social Networks should be the butt of the joke we used to tell in college about sociology — that it’s a subject in search of a subject matter.  As John says, "You’ve got to get in there and find ways to use these growing resources." (Right — because it sure ain’t obvious).

On the other extreme, the winner of this week’s "The Heck With That, I’m Growing My Own Resources" award is Elite Properties’ own Sacramento Real Estate Gal, Purva Brown, who graciously calls me a mentor even though most of her success is just from getting in there and learning and making things happen.  Purva just escaped the Google sandbox yesterday and is now appearing on page 2 of Google for a keyword combination with 725,000 competitors.  Not bad for six months!  Go Purva!

In other Web 2.0 news, Bruce Clay’s web site scared the tar out of me when I glanced at an article Why Social Media.  Bruce is a very renowned SEO expert, so if he’s telling you to yank your YouTube [I can’t believe he said that], part time luddites like me are in a heap of trouble.  It turns out the article was by a guest author, so it looks like I dodged a bullet for this week.

New reader and fellow Real Estate Marketing author Tim O’Keefe throws a much needed wet blanket on the often lightless fire of ActiveRain. 

Back in the heady world of experimentation, this week social networking for Realtors super-trailblazers Ashley Drake Gephart and Bill Gassett invited me to a new business social network, Konnect.com.  Social network #1,327, please fix your search engine if you want to be taken seriously before the Internet moves on to the next big thing.

You should be reading this guy, if you’re not already.

Do you need a free ratings widget for your blog?  Chances are good that you don’t.  No link for you, Outbrain.  (Doh!)

Meantime for those of you who are not content with these mere seven-day retrospectives, Tamar Weinberg has prepared a list of 2007’s Best Internet Marketing Blog Posts, hat tip to Andy Beard.  Those of you who feel compelled to take on John Jantsch’s challenge to "find ways to use these growing resources", please work your way through the list and report back.  Hey, come to think of it, Ashley and Bill should be guest authors here…

This is the second article in our three-part series that shows you how to ease your writing load by using some easy to follow formulae for your blogging.

See Items 1-7 in Part One of the Series.

See Items 15-21 in Part Three the Series.

Sometimes you just won’t feel like writing, and sometimes you won’t know what to write. When that happens, you can fall back on these twenty-one simple, tried and true formulas and whip out a post in anywhere from three to thirty minutes.

8. The Bad MLS Photo
   If the real estate market update is my favorite crutch, Athol Kay pioneered the use of bad MLS photos to create articles that take perhaps one tenth the time of a real estate market update. Of course, the down side to less text is less text, and in Athol’s case the bad photos serve to promote his photographic interests (and business). But to the rest of us, as space filler the bad MLS Photo is hard to beat.
    
9. The Local Photo of Interest
   Do you enjoy taking pictures of the local architecture? Or maybe golf courses are your thing, or beautiful local landscapes or parks. An interesting photograph can serve as the centerpiece to an excellent local interest piece, while your title can help you go after a great long tail search result.
    
10. The Mortgage News Update
    If you have a terrific lender who’s willing to put together a series of pieces updating your clients on the latest finance trends, consider yourself fortunate. Good mortgage bloggers are even more rare than good real estate bloggers. But you don’t have to let that stop you. One great source for such a mortgage update piece is Freddie Mac’s weekly Mortgage Market Survey. You could either build a weekly piece based using this survey as a starting point, or just quote the results occasionally.This should go without saying, perhaps, but for this and all the suggestions in this article, always remember to be fair to the copyright holders — quote your sources and stay within fair use guidelines.
     
11. The Reader Contest
    You might try getting your readers involved by offering a prize. It doesn’t have to be expensive, a $5.00 Starbucks gift card or similar token will work. Having your readers “Guess the Comps” on homes will tell other readers a good deal about how Realtors and the public come up with prices. Or you could run a local interest contest (see tip #5, the local shout out), asking for tips for the best local restaurant, park, club, or the like. A variation here is to sponsor a contest for local authors to contribute some local interest articles to your blog. Sponsoring a school essay contest gets us outside the realm of “quick and easy”, but it’s a great way to get your name in front of the community.One thing you need to be careful of before using this approach (or the next one) is to have an awareness of how big your readership is. If you’re sponsoring a community contest, that’s not so much an issue, but if you’re asking your readers to respond to a contest or survey and your blog is brand new, you might find that the results are embarrassingly lukewarm. But if you think you have enough readers to make it work, don’t be afraid to try it. The nice thing about a blog is that your mistakes will scroll down!
     
12. The Reader Survey
    Another way to get readers involved in your blog is to ask them for a response in the form of a survey. You might ask people to respond (without naming names) to tell you how happy (or not) they were with the last Realtor® they used. Or you might your readers to tell you what the most important features of a home are, or what people like best about a given area.You might combine the survey approach with a contest (see last item). Again, you want to be aware of the size of your readership and keep your questions broad enough. Asking people what they like best about their home on Podunk Street on Possum Ridge’s Lower East Side probably narrows things down a bit much.
     
13. The Industry News Update / Response Piece
    We’ve already talked about the local newspaper response piece, where you discuss a local-interest article that either helps your readers or that you respond to critically. The industry news update is essentially the same sort of piece, using a different source. In California, for example, our state Realtor® association publishes monthly updates about real estate industry news, and their legal department now has their own blog that we can subscribe to. Are you mad about the NAR rule that local associations can say that everyone but us can use the term “MLS”? Then tell people how stupid it is. Did outlawing crossbows in listing presentations in your local area take the pressure off of sellers? Then you should endorse that! (I wish the MLS story was made up like the crossbow story — unfortunately that first one’s true).
     
14. The Blog Article Response Piece
    Did someone write something great / interesting / stupid on another blog? If they did, this may be a good opportunity for you to highlight / mention / punish them. Responding in some creative way to another blogger’s work is a time honored and common blogging technique, and it’s also a way to get your blog noticed among your peers. The only thing you want to be careful of is to make sure the original post — or at least, your response to it — is something that’s of interest to your readers. Bloggers sometimes suffer from a fair amount of echolalia, and often the most cited and most popular blogs among Realtors® have little or nothing to say to consumers.

See Also:

Twenty-One Easy Posts for Your Real Estate Blog, Part I

Twenty-One Easy Posts for Your Real Estate Blog, Part III

If you’re going to write three to ten blog posts per week, week in and week out, and still spend time showing homes, taking listings, and otherwise serving your real estate customers, it stands to reason that you’re not going to be Shakespeare every day. But don’t worry, the only guy who was Shakespeare every day was Shakespeare, and even he used formulas like reworking older stories and making them his own.

Sometimes you just won’t feel like writing, and sometimes you won’t know what to write. When that happens, you can fall back on these twenty-one simple, tried and true formulas and whip out a post in anywhere from three to thirty minutes. This list gives you both some general-purpose blogging formulas that apply to any blog, as well as some formulas that work especially well for real estate blogs.

This is the first part of a three part series. The rest of the series will be published later in this week and early next week. To be sure you don’t miss any of it, Subscribe Here.

1. The Real Estate Market Update
   I list this one as #1 for the simple reason that this is my personal favorite “article crutch”. Whenever my brain is in low gear, I do one of these. Or often I’ll sit down and do a week’s worth in a day. Start with an Excel Spreadsheet with two columns, one for the month just ended and one for the same month one year previously. List your average sale price, median sale price, average price per square foot, and any other data of interest you want to write about. A third column should have a formula that shows the percent change between the two columns.Save a blank copy with any Excel formulas you need as a template. To do your market update, go into your MLS, and enter the data for a given county or city or subdivision or what have you that you want to write about. Setting up the spreadsheet the first time may take up to a few hours depending on your Excel skill — if you need samples let me know. However, once you’re set up, you can research and write a post in about twenty to thirty minutes or so.
2. The Long Term Market Report Post
   There are many variations on the market update that compares year-to-year performance based on one-month snapshots one year apart. With some creativity and Excel you can create charts covering a whole year or more for whatever statistics you want to report on. Another variation is to simply enter a bigger set of data than a month for your snapshots. Sometimes you almost have to do this, especially if you’re reporting on a small sample of data.
3. The Newspaper Article Response Piece
   Did you see something in the newspaper that would help your readers? How about something that told them the real estate sky is falling, which got you madder than heck? Don’t hold it all in. A link to the online version of a local real estate article can be an easy springboard to a response piece. The articles of this sort that I’ve done seem to have been great comment generators.
4. The Client Shout Out
   Did someone close escrow recently on a great bargain home that you helped them get? Sure they did! How about a short piece congratulating them and talking about the process or the problem you helped them solve. Be sure to get your client’s permission for this one, and be sensitive to privacy issues (they may not want their last names or address used, for example). Photos of happy buyers in front of the home never hurt if you can get permission to use them.
5. The Local Shout Out
   Did your hair dresser make you look like a superstar recently? Or how about a restaurant you visited that gave you great service. Everyone loves to have their work appreciated, and people often will Google themselves or their businesses. Wouldn’t it be nice if they found you talking them up when they did? You might also use this type of piece to get your readership involved, by asking people to talk about local businesses that have done a really great job for them.
6. The Consumer Watch Dog Piece
   The flip side of the local shout, which identifies a purveyor of excellent service by name, is the anonymous consumer watch dog piece. You could write about mortgage fraud, or high mortgage costs, or “buying the listing”, “Listing Agent Scams to Avoid”, or any other practice or list of practices that is illegal, harmful, or disreputable. For this type of piece you generally don’t want to name individuals or businesses by name, but you do want to point out the trap that you’re hoping your client will avoid. Of course the implication (sometimes not so thinly-veiled) of these pieces is that the best way to avoid these sleazy operators is to pick a great agent like you who contains neither asbestos nor transfat.The down side of consumer watch dog articles is that their focus is on the negative side of things. As such, I wouldn’t rely on them too heavily, but they work well as an occasional piece.
7. How To (Do Something Something)
   I must admit that I sometimes find the real estate uses of this formula to be a bit hackneyed, so I wouldn’t rely on it too heavily, but it still works in a pinch. There are probably more articles online at this very moment about how to get your home ready to sell than there are atoms in the ocean — well, OK, maybe there aren’t that many. But what the heck, there’s room, write another one. Better yet, write one that somehow highlights what you bring to the table. Maybe you offer a staging credit, or maybe you’re good at staging a home yourself. If so, work that in.Another hackneyed use of this format is “How to Choose a Realtor®”. Such articles usually tend to tell people how to pick the author as the Realtor® — “It’s important when choosing a Realtor® to pick someone named John who’s more than six feet tall and drives a Honda”. Better: tell people to check references, and then link to a page where they can request YOUR references.Still, consumer watchdog style pieces fit the how to format nicely, e.g., “How to Avoid Getting Ripped Off at the Closing Table”, and the “X Web Sites That Can Help You Y” format is basically a How To variation. Specific variations on this formula can make for an original and interesting article. “How to Calculate the Total Cost of Ownership on a Condo”. Hey, that’s a good one. I think I’ll go write that one.

See Also:

Twenty-One Easy Posts for Your Real Estate Blog, Part II

Twenty-One Easy Posts for Your Real Estate Blog, Part III

A lot of Realtors® complain about lead generating services, many of which have aggressive and misleading sales tactics. For example, you haven’t been in business very long if you haven’t fielded a call offering you a unique opportunity to lock in your exclusive territory before someone else does. For only $400 per month, let’s say, you can own the zip code 95682 on the world famous SellMeAHouseNowPrettyPlease.com. Of course, it may turn out that SellMeAHouseNowPrettyPlease.com generates a lead for 95682 every 174 years, in which case you’ve paid $835,200 for the opportunity to generate a $25,000 commission by the year 2181.

Most of us would agree that there are more effective ad buys one could make.

In addition to the bad feeling left by scam operators like this, many Realtors® object to the idea of such big-budget “real estate interlopers” charging them for the privilege of doing transactions that would otherwise be “theirs”. Of course, embedded in that objection is the naive idea that if Realtor.com and Yahoo Real Estate weren’t around, you’d be at the top of the search engine enjoying the well deserved fruits of your license. Enter scam artist #2, who’ll “guarantee” to put you there. Again, for a very modest fee.

My Early Revelation

When I’d been in the business maybe four months or so, I was working my broker’s “floor time” one day when this short, old, bald guy who worked in my office came in and offered to sell me some leads “from his web site” — 30% referral fee on the first one and 25% thereafter. Now at the time I was failing in real estate after about ten years of (for the most part) succeeding in professional software development. Though I hadn’t yet seriously begun marketing to consumers online at this point, it took me about a minute and twenty-three seconds to figure out that if the short old bald guy could generate enough leads from the Internet to sell them off, Johnnie software developer could figure out how to the same thing, being younger, taller, still in possession of my hair, etc.

For the next several months, and for many, many hours over the five intervening years, I worked on surpassing this fellow’s business model, beating him first at his own search engine positions and later acquiring more valuable ones which into which he hadn’t even made inroads. SEO plus IDX was the basic formula, then as now.

It took a lot of time.

I don’t think I could replicate a lot of what I did today, but fortunately, as in the military, it’s significantly easier to defend an entrenched position than it is to attack one.

A Balanced Model

As much as I have swung from the extreme of potential lead consumer to “interloper” (which is another word for broker, by the way), I admit that there are two limitations to my own marketing strategy.

The first is that it is extremely time and labor intensive, and it hasn’t gotten any easier to do. I don’t think I could replicate a lot of what I did today, but fortunately, as in the military, it’s significantly easier to defend an entrenched position than it is to attack one. On the flip side, this means potential growth is harder to achieve.

The second limitation is that there’s no guarantee that major search engines will continue to rank me as they do now.

I believe that the problem with paying for leads is not that the big bad interlopers make us do it. We’re always doing it, one way or another — even when we buy yard signs or business cards. What’s truly at issue is how much do we have to pay, and what’s the return on what we pay?

I admit, I don’t have the specific numbers to tell tell you what the “right answer” here is. All I can suggest is keeping an open mind to the different ways to generate business online. I have used both pay-per-click and SEO to good effect, and I would definitely add pay-per-click into the mix if you need to start getting leads in right away. I also wouldn’t discount well known lead resellers like HomeGain, though I need to learn more about this aspect of the business. If you’ve used these firms successfully, please let me know.

Recently I announced a new guest author series entitled "What’s Your Internet Real Estate Marketing Strategy?"  The point of that series is to hear from Realtors® who are successful in their online marketing efforts but who have a view of Internet marketing that’s different from mine.

One of the ways it’s possible to be successful online that’s about as different as it can be from the way I do it is to use online lead reseller companies like HomeGain.com.  On Monday I’ll have an article that talks about how my own Internet marketing evolution is a response against a "lead reseller" agent in my office, and how I swung to the other extreme to become highly focused on Search Engine Optimization and content development.

With this in mind, this week I started looking into information about these companies and looking for Realtors® with an opinion on them one way or another.  Minnesota’s Josyln Panka sparked an excellent discussion, the comments of which serve as a sort of introduction to Realtor® opinions about HomeGain.  One commenter there, Nevada Broker, Sue Nelson, had some very positive things to say about her HomeGain results, so I stopped by and invited her to talk about her marketing strategy in our forthcoming series. Another person weighing in on this thread was Louis Cammarosano, HomeGain’s general manager.  Googling his name will bring you to all sorts of other interesting links about HomeGain versus Zillow.

Former HomeGain Sales Director Chris Hendricks defended HomeGain’s switch to a monthly-subscription model for its AgentEvaulator product by discussing an absolutely crucial element to successful online marketing — successful follow-up. 

Perhaps the best single source for discussion of HomeGain and other lead generation companies that I found was on Realtown.com’s Lead Generation Blog.  An excellent guide to who the players are is the "View by Vendor" blogroll on the left hand side, and the articles here are a good mix of criticisms of the Lead Generation companies and success stories.

Do you remember the anti-social Internet, where nothing was connected to anything and no one communicated using it?

Neither do I.

From its outset, the Internet has been about people sharing and communicating information and ideas. In the late 1980s, Tim Berners-Lee first conceived of a hypertext project at CERN as a means for researchers information. In August of 1991 the first web site was put online at CERN, and we’ve been all typing up a storm ever since. In addition to web sites and the tools to browse them, the first killer app of the Internet was e-mail.

In addition to email and web sites, electronic bulletin board systems (BBSs) like the ones I frequented on Fidonet in the eighties were, as the Wikipedia article correctly points out, a precursor to the World Wide Web. You could say that we had a social Internet before we had an Internet, and the latter was just a bunch of protocols to run it on.

Enter The Web 2.0 Now Here’s Something We Hope You’ll Really Like Social Internet

For the last few years a lot of people have been spending a great deal of time on various social networking sites. In 2006, Myspace allegedly reached the 100 million user mark — a number that at least one geek has debunked. The popular real estate social networking site, ActiveRain, also launched in 2006, and many agents and brokers including me have invested (squandered?) a great deal of time there. More recently, I’ve been amazed by how many messages I have whenever I log in at Facebook or Cre8Buzz or one of the other social networks I’ve participated in — and I’m not really that popular a guy. Ann Cummings invites me to use FunWall. David Smith pokes me. Oliver Muoto received a can of Whoop Ass.

Poor guy.

For awhile there I was getting email daily updates from Facebook, telling me the most inane things

I turned that off eventually.

Seven Criticisms of the Social Internet

1. It’s Amateur, in the sense that you don’t get paid for it.
   Andrew Keen has probably written more about this criticism than anyone. As a corollary, I agree with this argument, insofar as I’ve made a decent living off of several web sites I’ve created and maintained, but no money at all off of ActiveRain. Even the referrals I’ve received have not come from ActiveRain, but from people finding my own web sites.
2. Someone’s might be getting paid for it, but it won’t be you.
   One of the most amusing incidents in Move.com’s failed acquisition of ActiveRain was this ActiveRain apologia about who owns the content on ActiveRain. Still, I don’t recall any discussion about how the thirty-million would have been shared if the transaction went through. Oh. See also, this article about remodeling the kitchen in a house you rent.
3. It’s Amateur, in the sense of incompetent or unskilled
   Think: Myspace web pages. Pink on purple, anyone?
4. It’s Amateur, in the sense of trivial or unimportant
   OK, this one’s almost built in. In order to socialize, human beings have to lighten up a bit on their seriousness. Still, it does seem to me that one can base an adult friendship on banter a bit more sophisticated than throwing sheep at one another.
5. You Can’t Optimize for Every Web Site There Is
   Every web site has its own rules for getting to a top ranked listing. I prefer to shoot for the top of Google, Yahoo, and MSN in that order. These are sites that buyers and sellers use when they’re buying and selling, not socializing. Yes, this means I’ve had to give up my coveted #2 spot on ActiveRain. So far I haven’t noticed a difference.
6. It’s Anonymous
   Having their cake and eating it too, social Internet socialites believing in the absolute sanctity of open information (thou shalt not ever censor me), even if they don’t sign their names or take responsibility for their actions. Human-Powered Search Engine Mahalo goes a step further and recommends that instead of a photo of your human self, you “Be Cool” and use a Wee-Me Avatar instead. Apparently being Human-Powered wasn’t cool enough in its own right.
7. It Confuses Grouchiness with Erudition
   With a hat tip to Quote of the Day and the Vicomte de Chateaubriand (famous consumer of steak), “You Are Not superior just because you see the world in an odious light”. And yes, I do apply that criticism to myself as well, and see this as one of my less useful posts. I can never get enough of the Internet Commenter Business Meeting. To be sure, that’s not new, either. We had the same sort of thing going on in Fidonet. To puree a metaphor, there’s something about sitting behind a keyboard without a real face in front of you that makes it harder to wag your tail.

This week I finally published the video Windows Live Writer Tutorial that I’ve been meaning to do for some time. This tutorial goes through getting up and running, but I didn’t yet get into some of the really neat Live Writer features that would make you want to get up and running. As a supplement to my tutorial in the meantime you might check out some of the other reviews and articles out there. Phil Waineright’s Writer is Microsoft’s first Live Killer App has an older (but still good) overview of the features — and Live Writer now supports tags, which was missing when he wrote that post. Paul Stamatiou also wrote an excellent Live Writer Review with several screen shots based on the beta. Paul also mentions a few of the drawbacks of the software that I hadn’t noticed. Finally, Michael Pick has produced an excellent Windows Live Writer Video Review — which shows among other things that I need to work on my Camtasia to Youtube skills (no, I don’t think I will link to my Youtube video — that’s the point).

Aside from Live Writer goodies, the other news is that it is almost Christmas, which means it’s also almost New Years, so it’s time to start thinking about things like business planning and goal setting. There are only about two shopping days left to participate in DailyBlogTips’s Group Writing Project, 2008 Blogging Goals.

Finally, I installed a new theme for this site earlier this week, ParticleWave_01, a custom theme I designed recently. One of the items on what’s getting to be a rather long ParticleWave “to do list” is to make a version of that theme available.

Here is a tutorial about getting started with Windows Live Writer. It takes you through the process of downloading and installing the software and configuring it for your Wordpress Blog. Enjoy!