It’s 2006 and 200 million people are using the Internet to speak to friends, colleagues, and family. At any given moment more than 4,000,000 VoIP conversations are taking place on the Internet – all bypassing traditional telephony services.
The other day [on a newsgroup email thread] I happened to observe one real estate professional ask another what his Skype ID was. To me, this was surprising not because the inquirer didn’t know what Skype was; but because she was a member of a very influential organization that claims to provide advanced guidance concerning new Internet technologies.
Skype is presently used by hundreds of millions of Internet users for business and personal objectives. It makes it possible to communicate [mostly] freely over the Internet using VoIP (voice-over-IP) telephony. It was recently acquired by eBAY for a bit north of $4B US – the importance of this technology cannot be understated. At this moment, more than 4.5 million people are connected and freely conversing across the planet.
How can an active member of a professional real estate technology advisory organization, dedicated to guiding its members on all matters of emerging technology, miss something so big, so easy to use, so free, and so widely adopted? It seems odd to me that [some] real estate cyber organizations haven't uncovered or mentioned these near-ubiquitous technologies and services -- web services that are already part of the present-day Internet topology.
So I decided to do a little research into these “expert associations” – the results dumbfounded me – organizations that position themselves as “cyber experts" are not living up to their claims in some cases, or at least they're not indicating on their websites that they know anything about them. But this exercise also provides a snapshot of where you’re likely to find advice about forward-thinking ideas and technologies that may or may not impact your real estate business.
The research approach I used was simple – search each organizations' domain using the Google “site:” query for each of 16 terms related to Web 2.0 technologies (they're actually tags in this post). Then use the number of mentions of these technologies on each domain to calculate a comprehensive coverage quotient (the raw data can be found here).
This research approach is not a scientific method for determining how effective these organizations are at providing guidance concerning emerging technology because not all content they offer is visible on the public Internet. However, it does provide at least one indicator that’s reflective of their knowledge on these subjects and willingness to promote these ideas for their own competitive advantage. Furthermore, these organizations each advise their constituents concerning web visibility and search engine optimization and marketing. Presumably, they would attempt to optimize visibility on their respective core competencies (such as Web 2.0 fundamentals), so this analysis approach actually provides a measure of effectiveness across two dimensions; failing either test would be bad. ;-)
If you know of an organization you would like measured using the same approach, feel free to leave a comment (include a URL). Also, if you have a better way to identify pools of real estate cyber resources, please mention it. My approach is *one* approach to finding technology leadership and it's not intended to promote any specific firm or beat up any other firm; it's just data. Feel free to use it or develop your own metrics.
In any case, many of the topics in this analysis should be high on the list of technologies that real estate professionals need to be aware of to create and sustain competitive advantage on the Internet. These are the technologies that are shaping the way you work on the Internet today and will have even greater impact in the future.
So, who’s your technology guru?
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