I use this site to generate RSS feeds from webpages that don't have one. It comes in handy if you want to syndicate your most recent listings, or just a page of all your listings.

Anyways, I tested this service for about a month to make sure it was reliable. It seemed fine, so I actually started using the service to make banner ads for a few clients. And as soon as I start using these ads, the service goes down!

If anybody else uses www.feed43.com and know what is going on please let me know. And if you have an alternative, please let me know. Thanks,

I think i found a way to get Sprout to work. As long as clicks on this widget don't trigger the pop up blocker in IE7, looks like generation 3 of the listings widgets won't be far away.

I've been making banner ads like this for a while for my auctioneer clients who have RSS feeds.

They're amazing ads. They use the RSS feed to pipe in their most recent listings. They have a little logo for branding. And they get great results. The average click through rate is more than twice that of a normal banner ad.

But I have been limited to working only with auctioneers who already have an RSS feed. At least until now. I finally figured out a way to make an RSS feed out of content from any web page. Pipe that into www.widgetbox.com, and here are the results. All of these ads were made without a pre-existing RSS feed. This means any agent, office, team, or blogger can now run something like these. On top of that, the clicks are fully trackable, the ads work on any browser, and they can be served on any website just like a traditional banner ad.

The cost for something like this on www.baltimoresun.com depends on how many times you want your ad to run and where you want it to run. If you want it to run only in our Real Estate section, the ad costs $15 to run it 1,000 times. So you could run the ad 10,000 times for $150.

If you want a lower rate, we can run it across the entire site at $5.00 per thousand. So you can run the ad across our entire site with no targeting 30,000 times for $150.

At least, according to the City Paper. The full article is here.

It's not all good news for us. Somehow, we lost best local newspaper to the Examiner. The Examiner's Adam Meister also won "Best Local Blog". And to rub a little salt in the wound, we also got a nice sarcastic award for "Best Business Plan".

Not that I can completely disagree with these choices. I followed Adam Meister a while ago when he was doing the whole TechBalt thing but fell off the bandwagon during his political campaigns. There are several blogs on AR I'd rather read, but he's not bad.

Oh, one thing I do argue with is "Best Billboard". It's obviously the one with the Natty Boh guy proposing to the Utz girl. Not even close!

I'm putting together a blog sponsorship package for our Real Estate blog. Included would be about 30,000 banner impressions on the blog as well as a mention in about 25,000 co-branded ads like this that would run throughout www.baltimoresun.com.

This is just a mock up, but the final version will probably be very similar. Total cost for the sponsorship will probably be around $450-$500 per month.

Or, you can promote your own blog with an RSS ad on baltimoresun.com. I'll post more details about that later, or feel free to contact me,

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A friend told me about a cool site that rates the walkability of 2,500 neighborhoods nation wide. Walk Score calculates the walkability of an address by locating nearby stores, restaurants, schools, parks, etc. Walk Score measures how easy it is to live a car-lite lifestyle—not how pretty the area is for walking. This is especially important to note for Pigtown. I wouldn't feel safe walking to or in many of these businesses, but maybe that's just me.

Test for round 2, a fully trackable flash ad: