The other day I heard (through the grapevine) that the Real Estate CyberStars had an ongoing debate about the value of blogging and questions arose about the very need for blogs and RSS. It's a good question...

Do we need blogs and RSS?

In 2002 I would have had a tough time answering this question – at that time there was little data to support any reasonable basis for a conclusion. However, in mid-2006, I have no trouble responding (or debating) the benefit of participating in Web 2.0 activities. Of course, I am biased – I own a company that provides RSS plumbing services to firms like Intel and VeriSign, as well as a Blogsite™ technology to Real Estate Blogsites™. In any case, here are my comments about Web 2.0 and why it should be meaningful and important to all business people today, and in the coming years.

It is here (in Web 2.0) that the living web is being designed and built up larger every day. It is comprised of weblogs, web feeds, forums, wikis, photo-blogs, photo-sharing services, tagging services, metrics-tracking services, podcasting and vidcasting providers, and a plethora of web services each intended to interoperate to create loose couplings that achieve much more than Web 1.0 (the HTML web) could ever hope to achieve. It is Web 2.0 that is reshaping the Internet landscape itself – from a purely human-based web, to a machine/human-based web. The two fundamental business drivers of this shift are optimization of continually shrinking human resources, and operational efficiencies of semantic content (i.e., tagged information, XML, etc).

This is a big pill to swallow indeed and there are lots of new terms to learn about – so let’s break a few of these ideas down to see if they represent solid business requirements.

What are the big boys doing?

We’ll start by focusing on weblogs in general. Consider that every major search engine (arguably the bell-weathers of the Internet) have a blogging strategy but not just for personal blog tools – they have initiatives in place to deal with many aspects of blogging including (but it not limited to) legal and social computing issues, corporate blogging, syndication and aggregation services (see MyYahoo, GMail, Blogger, Google Newsreader, etc), search systems (see Yahoo and Google’s BlogSearch systems), and even XML indexing solutions (results in Yahoo are now calling out RSS feeds for blogs). At no time in computing history has every major technology and services vendor concluded the same thing about a single technology idea. Can all these companies be wrong about this conclusion at the same time? – highly unlikely.

Brand Reputation and The Living Web

If you agree that the “living web” – where people share information to create better awareness – is both alive and continually growing as a source of useful information to consumers and businesses, you must logically embrace the idea that the web of conversations is also where brand reputations are validated. As you know, brands are typically shaped by marketing activities, but validated by people; consumers, competitors, even government organizations like the FDA, FTC and others. While you may think that your business is isolated from the living segment of the web, your greatest enemies, your most avid supporters, and your future customers are participating in the living web in growing numbers every day. As such, you must ask yourself – do I want these customers, competitors, journalists, and prospects to shape my brand reputation without any guidance from me?

This is the same question you probably asked yourself in 1995 (or later ;-) when you decided to create a web site and join companies that are marketing their products and services on the Web. Eventually you came to realize it was a good idea – you launched a web site – and you probably can’t imaging running your business effectively without it. Deciding to participate in Web 2.0 is not unlike the decision to adopt cell phone technology, ball point pens, email and instant messaging for business use, and the hundreds of other good ideas that comprise the infrastructures you use and rely on every day. Blogs and RSS are no different – they’re simply new ways of communicating that are better than old ways – just as cell phones are better than mobile radios. Is there a realtor today that has not adopted cell technology? – probably not. If they didn’t, they probably went out of business because they couldn’t compete with those that did - and goody for those that did! ;-)

Content Syndication

Let’s shift our focus to content discoverability – a subject of great concern as real estate competitors duke it out in an attempt to be more findable and create greater reach of their marketing message than other realtors. Typically (and historically), humans search for content they want. However, there’s been a strong shift by users that want to find stuff but have little time to surf or search for it. Enter RSS (a content syndication format); this technology has begun to emerge in many places including the desktops and online accounts of millions of users. By no means is it ubiquitous. However, let’s look at the data about RSS, commonly known as Really Simple Syndication, and popularized by the early bloggers in the first years of this decade.

In 1998 I searched Google for pages about RSS; I found about 220 pages. Today there are 3.92 Billion pages about RSS, almost 100% are in reference to Really Simple Syndication; that’s pretty significant. This summer Microsoft released IE7. Most analysts believe the adoption rate of this new browser will be equally significant predicting more than 500 million people will be using it by the end of 2007. It contains an embedded RSS newsreader that seamlessly bakes the idea of content syndication right into a tabbed pane – a pervasive adoption of this format in a manner consistent with bookmarks and many other things web users have become accustomed to. Microsoft doesn’t call it RSS – they refer to RSS feeds as web feeds. This is a clear indication that RSS has already become a main-stream idea worthy of use by everyone.

Do realtors need Blogs and RSS? -- I can’t answer that because I’m not a realtor, but I have to ask – can they afford to ignore an idea that has now become a core value for millions of Internet users and businesses?