I've listened to Ben and Bob talk about how they would like AR to become the preeminent consumer- and agent-facing website for real estate topics, and I'm thrilled with their vision. And it appears that most of you are too. With wide support for providing more quality content, we can almost certainly make this happen, and I'm ready to do my part.
But what about fun?
I write 20 or so market reports a month, and the back links from those feed my IDX website and provide a bunch of page 1 results for my long-tail searches. They're what generates reliable business, but they're not particularly written for consumers or the AR community, although they do have some utility there - they're written for Google. And they're a slog to get through every month.
When I need a break from them, I want to have some fun with my AR pals. So I write Grab Bag posts, or put up pictures of my menagerie, or share something interesting and outrageous, or whatever. And many of you do the same thing. And we all laugh or sympathize and we have a good time.
Does this foolishness fit in with the vision for AR? I think it does. We constantly refer to the community as one of the key elements of the AR experience, and one of the reasons that we even have a sense of it is that we have come to know one another as real people through posts like these.
We're not going to learn much about the author from market reports and localism posts - we may develop a great amount of respect for someone's expertise or ethical approach to real estate, but is that enough? I can make a better comment, for example, on one of Noah Seidenberg's or Michael Jacobs's market report posts because I've come to know quite a bit about them from other stuff they have written. Heck, it's one of the reasons I want to comment in the first place.
I don't think the community functions as well without the foolishness. But if we're going to bring in a lot more consumers and a lot more new industry members, maybe we're going to want to provide a less obvious place for off-topic random fun. Is the Just for Fun category or Members-Only enough, or do we want to insulate these posts more? And can we do that without making it too difficult to access? I don't know, but I hope we never give up on goofing around with each other.
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