There is a tendency to start believing that things that one sees on-line must somehow be true. Of course, some things (like the occasional rants here on AR) are so outrageous that we automatically discount them and the person making the statements. However, we may have become like more and more teachers who are allowing students to site blogs and wikis as their "sources" for materials in papers that they do. We tend to believe that it must be true because we saw it on-line.
Both blogs and wikis are collections of the personal thoughts of the various authors and may or may not have any basis in facts. There are well over 150 Million Blogs out in the blog-o-sphere (an estimate based upon the last number that I could find, which was an estimated by David Thiere in the Blog The Technology Liberation Front in May of 2008. I didn't attempt to find out how many wikis are out there somewhere in what I imagine is called the wiki-sphere.
So our little corner of the blog-o-sphere here at AR is a minor backwater at best; however, it is our backwater and one that I enjoy contributing to. Aside from the occasional rant or two, much of the information presented here seems to be good; however, one needs to view things seen here with the same grain of salt that one would use in other corners of the blog-o-sphere. Lots of the things presented as "facts" here may in fact be just someone's opinion and that based upon just their limited experiences. That is particularly true when the blog posts venture into areas where few, if any real rules or laws or guidelines apply - such as the whole short sales topic. In other areas things that might apply in one state might not apply in others, so one has to be able to understand what is read within the context of one's on state laws or the rules of local boards.
On some areas of comment here one also needs to use the smell test. If it just doesn't smell right to you, then it's probably not right - at least for you. There are lots of insta-flip (or double-flip) deals going on right now that have trouble passing that test, at least for me. You could also use the walks like a duck test - if it looks like fraud and walks like fraud, there's a good probability that it's FRAUD! There's some of that going around, too.
I tend to read stuff here with an eye towards seeing what sources are referenced by the author ( if they have links to sources I follow them to see if I believe that source is legit) and what leap, if any, the author had to make to get from the base information of that source material to whatever conclusion he/she has drawn and decided to share in the blog post. Even if the source material is very creditable, the author may have drawn a conclusion from it that I just can see or maybe that just isn't there.
As an example, there have been numerous blogs about the various federal programs that were put in place to try to stem the tide of home foreclosures in America. Some of the bloggers think they are great and might yet work and some say they are terrible and haven't got a chance of working. Both point to the same numbers and see the level in the glass in different ways. Is one side wrong and the other right? NO. Both sides are just expressing opinions and their blogs must be taken as such.
So; is So-and-So Bank a sleaze-ball operation just because some AR blogger had a bad experience with one of their employees? No. Is the market turning around and the recession over just because of some AR post that talks about how great things are in some tiny corner of the U.S. market? No. Is the sky falling because some lender asset manager in some obscure corner of America forced the agents in a real estate transaction to cut their commissions? No. But, can we all learn something from reading these blogs? Sure, if we use the same common sense filters that we should be using for every piece of new information that we encounter and sort out the facts from the opinion and decide what we're going to do with both. Happy blogging!
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