Wanna Pay For Advertising Like This?

May 19th, 2008 Geekage and Blogging, Humor atholkay No Comments »

Everyone loves a widget that makes a pretty graph…

…except when you’re asking $688,000 and there is no way to turn the damn thing off on the expensive web hosting platform you pay too much money for.

 Apparently you’re safest in you car. Ideally driving away from this listing.

Hat tip Malcolm Waring for the image.

Bad News. Good News.

April 29th, 2008 Geekage and Blogging atholkay 1 Comment »

Apparently if Google updates Page Rank with your website offline for the whole thing, you get a big fat zero.

Last week despite being semi-functional and not even posting once I had one of the best weeks ever for readership.

Almost Back

April 20th, 2008 Geekage and Blogging 7 Comments »

Just a quick note of thanks to all those who have emailed me over the last week asking where I had disappeared to. Myself along with a number of other real estate blogs have been essentially hacked to pieces and we’re in the process of putting Humpty Dumpty back together again.

And when I say “we’re” I really mean Jim Cronin and Co at Tomato Blogs are doing the work and I’m not doing much of anything. The site looks mostly back, but I can still lots of little problem areas to be fixed yet. Not sure if it’s even possible to get it back 100%.

So still here, just an enforced vacation of sorts.

Im The David Hasselhoff of Bad MLS Photos

April 4th, 2008 Geekage and Blogging No Comments »

Seriously, look what Lebensraum had to say about me.

Athol Kay sammelt auf seinem Blog die schlechtesten Immobilienfotos. Auch hierzulande ist es oft unglaublich, welch miese Bilder oft verwendet werden, um Häuser und Wohnungen zu verkaufen - sogar für Immobilien, die mehrere hunderttausend Euro kosten sollen. Da werden Kameras schief gehalten, Bilder nicht nachbearbeitet und sehr häufig Details fotografiert, die man eigentlich nicht sehen wollte. Oder völlig nichtssagend werden leere Räume fotografiert, wie hier am Bild zu sehen. Die Aussicht, in dieses Traumzimmer einziehen zu dürfen, ist doch wirklich verlockend

Which according to Babelfish, translates to

Athol Kay collects the worst real estate photos on its Blog. Also in this country is often unbelievable it, what bad pictures to be often used, in order to sell houses and dwellings - even for real estates, which are to cost several hundredthousand euro. There cameras are kept inclined, are not worked over again pictures and are not photographed very frequently details, which one did not want to see actually. Or completely insignificant empty areas are photographed to be seen as here at the picture. The prospect to be allowed to draw into this dream room is nevertheless really enticing

Its not a perfect translation, but its actually impressive that it translates instantly.

Short Blog Vacation

April 2nd, 2008 Geekage and Blogging No Comments »

Im off until Friday, just enjoying letting The 24 Worst Bad MLS Photos of the Year post sit on the front page.

Love to all.

HUGE Pro-Consumer Connecticut MLS News!

March 6th, 2008 Connecticut, Deeper Thoughts, Geekage and Blogging, Photography No Comments »

I’m doing back flips here! Direct from my email…

“Dear CTMLS Participants & Subscribers,

 I am pleased to report that CTMLS has doubled the total number of photos allowed on MLXchange to twenty! 

Many of you have asked for more than ten photos over the past year, so CTMLS purchased the extra space to allow twenty - which should meet just about everyone’s photo needs!  With the launch of CTReal.com, the official search engine of both CTMLS and the Connecticut Association of REALTORS®, Inc. later this month, all twenty photos will be available to the public.  Make the most of it - it’s FREE!

 It’s one more benefit of the Statewide MLS… keep your eyes peeled for more news coming soon!”
 

BOOM! Twenty photos per listing. That is a massive change from just ten photos. This will completely alter the way photography will have to be done for listings. In one sense my workload just doubled, but on the other hand my work just got twice as important.

Agents simply cannot hope to squeak by on 5–6 photos any longer. Buyers will simply think you are hiding something from them. For smaller homes 20 photos is going to mean multiple photos from different angles on some rooms. You’re going to have to show everything.

And I mean everything.

The public website CTReal.com – unfortunately nothing to show but the “in development” placeholder as yet – could become the ultimate Connecticut real estate public search platform.

This is a serious kick in the face to Realtor.com et al. Why pay for enhanced listings etc if the public can go straight to the firehose and get it all direct from the MLS public site. If the public MLS site can gain traction with the public, it will ultimately deep six all the third party vendors depending on listing feeds etc.

Of course I’ve said all this before… check out Just Make The MLS Open To The Public And Be Done With It Please. written back in June 2007.

…The solution is painfully simple. The MLS systems simply need to be made fully public on a public “read only” level and an agent “read/write” basis.

Charge the public $20 for a years public membership and the MLS’s will make a ton of cash. It will kill off all the third party listing companies. It will destroy claims of hiding information. It will destroy all the lead selling pirates. Even the Department of Justice thinks that the MLS serves the public as a cost saving measure. It’s a rare benign monopoly, that’s why the DOJ sues NAR etc to get discount brokers fully enfranchised as MLS members…

It may not be exactly as I wrote (LOL I said charge $20 for it!), but the general thrust is the same. Let agents have read/write privileges and let the public have read only access. How much the public gets to see I don’t know as yet, but 99% of what they want to see is the price and the photos anyway.

Unquestionably this is good both for consumers and Connecticut Realtors. This goes a long way to creating an efficient 21st Century marketplace to buy and sell real estate.

I Hate Wordpress Page Editor

October 27th, 2007 Geekage and Blogging 2 Comments »

Good grief the Wordpress page editor is a piece of crap.

I love BlogJet for posting with to the blog, but it doesn’t do stand alone page creation and I’m forced into using the horrible Wordpress default editor.

After about two hours fighting it, I simply quit. I’ll post my photos here like blog pages and just permalink to them. Grrrr.

RSS readers, sorry about the posting spam thats coming…

Yahoo Kicks Me Off MyBlogLog

October 11th, 2007 Geekage and Blogging 3 Comments »

Nice, now I have to get a Yahoo ID to appear in anyones MyBlogLog thingy, or use MyBlogLog.

Thanks soooo much for the heads up Yahoo.

Blogroll Updating

September 13th, 2007 Geekage and Blogging 9 Comments »

Been a while since I actually worked on the blog itself rather than simply posting.

I had too many post categories, so I reduced them to a more manageable level. I’m still figuring out the right style for my Good Vibes posts.

I also updated the blogroll and moved almost everything around. It’s been months since I updated, so if I missed you please leave a comment.

Some very good blogs that I think could be “My A List” or “Almost My A List” I have in the more particular blogroll link areas. I think they will be better found there.

Seeing I know some of you will wonder… You get on “My A List” though a consistent and fairly high production level of good content that I like. If you get Feed Bagged a lot that’s generally a sign. “My A List” isn’t tenure either. I dropped some and added some.

I’m as hard to please as a spoiled cat.

Meow.

Good Vibes - Link Out!

August 16th, 2007 Geekage and Blogging, Good Vibes 4 Comments »

One of the things I do particularly well as a blogger is link OUT.

Hey I admit it, I love to get linked IN as much as anyone, but I don’t worry about that all that much.

I’m not even really scheming for getting linked IN by linking OUT. If it comes it comes. I think with The Feed Bag in effect I link OUT maybe 10–15 times the number of times I get linked IN.

I have however had an number of emails from other people in the last week just turning cartwheels for joy for getting linked to by me, or positive comments from me on Reagent. That really floats my boat.

Though I do know this much. We’re on the World Wide Web. Every time you’re linking OUT, someone else is getting linked IN. That sends little tremors through the entire web. What you send out, you tend to get back.

You know how much you love getting linked IN. That’s how everyone feels about it too. Don’t wait for link love to come to you and tell you that you’re “Some Pig”. Send someone else link love and let them know how great they are.

So how are you doing? Do you link OUT?