activerain updates: New Release: Q&A, Listings Tool & the AR Staff
- 05/23/12 02:39 AM
Every day we receive new ideas, suggestions and requests to make ActiveRain better from our lovely members and we take those little golden nuggets to the Round Table. With all hands on deck, we decide what is actually possible and what requests will make ActiveRain better. Some of your gems don't get too far but others make it all the way through to production.
Here's what we have in store for our release on Wednesday May 23rd. This release will not require us to take the site down so there won't be any outages for you to worry about.
Expanded … (99 comments)
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activerain updates: Upgrading ActiveRain's SEO: Better SEO = More Traffic
- 04/12/12 02:58 AM
Recently, having the advantage of the resources of Market Leader, we've been able to plan a more clear path for how ActiveRain's development resources are utilized. Previously, we've never had a very structured development cycle here at ActiveRain. Now that we have put some major infrastructure upgrades behind us, we get to focus on enhancements to the site that will bring additional benefit the entire community.
One of the projects we are currently working on involves some significant upgrades to the SEO of ActiveRain. There are so many factors that go into search engine optimization and our friends at Google are … (84 comments)
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activerain updates: Social Integration
- 08/15/11 05:56 AM
Our team has been hard at work developing a painless way to syndicate your content and stay connected. May I introduce to you, Social Integration. Sounds like a hard core rock n' roll band to me but it's something much more.
I hope all of you use Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Google + is a the new kid on the block but many of you are already using it so we've included it in our new development. Liking and sharing posts on social networks is critical to your SEO. Making your readers aware of not just your own but other worthy … (168 comments)
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activerain updates: "ActiveRain Bloggers Lounge" at Inman Connect
- 07/30/07 01:10 PM
Jon and me are just finishing up puttingthe final touches on the "ActiveRain Blogger's Lounge" at the upcoming Inman Real Estate Connect Conference here in San Francisco. The blogger's lounge will provide a place for blogger's and anyone else at the conference to plug into some more reliable Internet or just hang out. We'll have some refreshments on hand to help people refuel from what is bound to be an grueling conference.
During most of the day we will have a video camera setup and have some "special" ActiveRain interviewers on hand. We will be interviewing the victims the happen to stumble into the room and the video casts will be … (32 comments)
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activerain updates: New batch of ActiveRain enhancements
- 06/06/07 02:54 AM
We just put up a new batch of enhancements to ActiveRain based off of your requests these past couple weeks. These enhancements are a part of a continuous effort to improve your experience and provide you with more ways to find content.
New filter for blog posts:
Enhancement #1 is an additional filter for browsing blog posts that provides a new way to find posts by who wrote them.
You can now do things such as show only posts written by loan officers or choose to show only the posts targeted to real estate professionals of those bloggers to whom you have subscribed(a request … (68 comments)
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activerain updates: Private groups and other enhancements
- 05/20/07 03:46 PM
Private groups are here! We just released them along with several enhancements to the existing group features on ActiveRain. The three main improvements were, the addition of private groups, the ability to invite members to a group, and categories to help people find groups to join. Details on all of these below...
Private Groups
Private groups are groups that are only accessible to members of that group. New members must either be approved or invited by the group administrator(s) before they are granted access to view the messages in the group or post. For example you might want to create a private group … (57 comments)
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activerain updates: Meet your fellow rainers - ActiveRain's birthday bashes
- 05/16/07 05:17 AM
Many of you have already seen the posts flying around or may have noticed the links from the front page. Next month in June, the ActiveRain Real Estate Network is having it's one year birthday. To help celebrate Lydia has been working diligently with a number of members to coordinate five seperate ActiveRain get togethers. One in each corner of the country (WA, FL, NY, CA) and one more or less in the middle (Chicago), each happening on a Saturday during the month.
Yes, there will be cake, but the main purpose of this gatherings is to allow members who may have … (27 comments)
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activerain updates: Non-member comment notification improvements
- 05/12/07 06:18 AM
This morning we put up a couple minor feature enhancements to ActiveRain, which members keep asking for. Here are two of the main ones.
Comment notification for non-members
We added a new way for non-activerain members to receive email notifications of replies to comments they leave on blogs here at ActiveRain. This enhancement was mainly made to make it easier for consumers who visit the site to track the conversations they may get involved in through blog comments. We also eliminated the (up to now) unused email address field for non-member comments, though an email address is required to get notifications.
Added more member … (28 comments)
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activerain updates: Some updates to the front page
- 05/06/07 07:30 AM
It should be pretty obvious to anyone visiting the site that we made a couple changes to the front page of ActiveRain this morning. It is just the prelude to many more changes over the next week or two. We wanted to make sure we highlighted some areas of the site that were getting lost in the shuffle. As always lot us know what you think.
-Matt Heaton (ActiveRain CEO)
… (39 comments)
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activerain updates: Big traffic increases for ActiveRain and Localism
- 03/22/07 09:54 AM
Back on January, 30th I made a post about both ActiveRain.com and Localism.com achieving some traffic milestones.
ActiveRain and Localism each hit milestones yesterday
I like to share these milestones as ActiveRain makes it march towards, uh, world domination. I love numbers so their fun to occassionally take a look at, and it also effects how much online exposure members are getting.
ActiveRain.com
Jan. 30, 2007: 10,308 unique visitors
Mar. 19, 2007: 24,289 unique visitors (135% increase in traffic)
Localism.com
Jan: 30, 2007: 1,126 unique visitors
Mar. 19, 2007: 3,881 unique visitors (245% increase in traffic)
By my calculations ActiveRain should have by-passed Google and taken over the Internet sometime in 2008 … (59 comments)
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activerain updates: Support for video and multimedia on ActiveRain
- 02/28/07 07:14 AM
As of this morning we've made some adjustments to our platform that should allow members to more easily include, video, podcasts and other multimedia in their blog posts. This had been one of the common complaints with our platform and we are working to solve it as we work towards the upcoming release of additional blog customization.
We currently don't provide a hosting service for video or podcasts, they will have to be hosted on another site, but we will explore this option in the future. To add an externally hosted video or podcast to your blog use the "HTML" button … (34 comments)
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activerain updates: ActiveRain and Localism each hit milestones yesterday
- 01/30/07 04:15 AM
Yes, I've been pretty quiet on ActiveRain as of late, but that's a good thing. It means I'm focusing more attention "behind the scenes" on improving ActiveRain's future. I did notice that both ActiveRain.com and Localism.com hit traffic milestones yesterday.
ActiveRain.com had it's first day with over 10k unique visitors (10,308 to be exact), after coming within 100 visitors of that mark three days in a row last week. Localism.com also had it's first day over 1,000 unique visitors yesterday and we haven't technically "launched" the site yet. In both cases the majority of these visitors are coming off of search engines such as Google … (16 comments)
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activerain updates: Localism update - Neighborhoods, communities, urban villages...
- 01/24/07 06:48 AM
Again, if you don't know about Localism our consumer portal which is under development you can read more here. As promised we are pushing new features every couple days to get us to an official launch in a few months. This morning we released an update allowing members to add communities/neighborhoods/urban villages, or whatever they are called in your city.
One frustration I've often heard from consumers or agents a like about real estate sites is the information stops at the city level. Almost all cities are broken down into smaller regions which often don't have standardized names or boundaries. This makes … (80 comments)
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activerain updates: Jonathan makes his triumphant return to ActiveRain
- 01/20/07 07:28 AM
We are please to announce that Jonathan Washburn, one the original founders of ActiveRain has returned to a full-time position with the company. A little over a year and a half ago, long before the ActiveRain Real Estate Network was launched, Jon left to focus on his other real estate ventures including Brio Realty.
Many of you have probably seen Jon lurking around on the ActiveRain, commenting and occasionally posting, but you will see him begin to take a much more visible and active role inside the community along with Caleb and myself. His presence will also help me focus much more energy on product development, and launching new … (40 comments)
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activerain updates: Lots of site updates Tuesday morning...
- 01/14/07 04:44 PM
Just a heads up to ActiveRain members, there will be a whole bunch of site updates coming on Tuesday morning. Many of these updates are based on member feedback over the previous two weeks. Here's a bullet list of some of the updates, there will be more details Tuesday morning.
Members will automatically receive points when adding new neighborhoods through Localism, and members to previously added neighborhoods will be credited points. We're adding the ability to make blog posts specific to communities/neighborhoods and and also providing a space for these posts to display on Localism.comDue to overwealming support from our members, neighborhood content on localism will … (38 comments)
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activerain updates: Top referrers, image uploaders, posters and more...
- 01/14/07 04:28 PM
In early Dec. I put up a post highlighting some of the top contributors the ActiveRain Real Estate Network, Top member referrers in november. I thought I do a followup post to highlight the top referrers in December and also some of the other top contributors towards building Localism. Right now the rewards are simply points, and the good feeling that comes with know that you're helping to build something special, but hopefully next month we'll have some other prizes we can hand out (hint, hint :)
Top member referrers in Dec:
Suzanne Marriott
43 members referred
Tony Marriott
37 members referred
Nima "The Mortgage Man"
26 members referred
Jeff Turner has … (30 comments)
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activerain updates: ActiveRain traffic stats
- 01/03/07 03:41 AM
I used to occasionally put up a post about the growth in traffic to ActiveRain, but I haven't done so in a few months. Just been way too busy. But after seeing what is happening the last couple days I thought I had to share.
Yesterday alone, ActiveRain.com had a record of 8,834 unique visitors, viewing a total of 183,480 pages and generating slightly over a million hits on our servers. As of 8:00 are this morning we are 25% over the pace from yesterday so unless our servers crash we should have our first day over 10k visitors.
Where is this traffic coming from? Primarily off … (58 comments)
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activerain updates: Points, dashboard changes and other stuff...
- 01/02/07 06:48 AM
Some of you (ok, many of you) already noticed some changes to the Blog Dashboard this morning and have noticed some changes to how blog posts are scored recently. This is all part of our continuous evolution to try to keep things fair to members, both new and old. Handing out points is our way or rewarding those who help built the ActiveRain Real Estate Network. Having lots of points will result in lots of additional exposure on ActiveRain.com and Localism.com both to consumers and your peers.
While points result in a lot of complaints have also been one of biggest contributors to … (73 comments)
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activerain updates: Localism.com photo uploads - update
- 12/30/06 08:16 AM
This is an update to the post Upload regional photos to Localism.com and earn points!
Based on member comments we made a couple of quick changes to the photo upload capability on the consumer portal Localism.com
Photos are now being automatically resized to a maximum of 800x600 upon upload, since full size pictures were being uploaded straight from digital cameras.We added the ability for members to delete photos they've uploaded. There is now a login button where ActiveRain members can log in in the upper right hand corner of the screen. Uploading a photo which requires a username and password will also automatically log … (39 comments)
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activerain updates: Upload regional photos to Localism.com and earn points!
- 12/29/06 07:30 AM
For those of you that haven't yet heard about the consumer side to ActiveRain at Localism.com (under construction) you might want to check out the following posts.
What is Localism? Some Localism.com updates What's Your Strategy for ActiveRain/Localism: "Umbrella or Bucket?" We want to compile a list of photos and images that represent the various States/Counties/Cities (and soon neighborhoods). We're specifically looking for images that might give the consumer a feel for the community. If you have photos that you wish to contribute they can now be uploaded on Localism.com You will have to provide your ActiveRain username/password in order to upload a photo, … (92 comments)
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Every day we receive new ideas, suggestions and requests to make ActiveRain better from our lovely members and we take those little golden nuggets to the Round Table. With all hands on deck, we decide what is actually possible and what requests will make ActiveRain better. Some of your gems don't get too far but others make it all the way through to production.
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