I've been very impressed with Mary McKnight's commentary on ActiveRain; she has exceptional insight and a firm understanding of why blogs and Web 2.0 are important. She also provides excellent guidance concerning search engine optimization; guidance that I find useful and accurate. If anyone asked, I would recommend her as an advisor concerning these technical subjects.
While perusing some links today I happened to notice this page - BEST AND WORST real estate blogs. I'm not a big fan of the idea that calling out best and worst of anything is good - it causes people to change their behavior without a complete picture. I once saw a movie by accident - I was at a friends house and they rented a DVD - the title is not important - but I thoroughly enjoyed the film; it was excellent. However, I would have enjoyed it more on the big screen, but I was deprived that experience because I took the advice of a film critic that (in my 20-20 hindsight) could not have been more wrong about the quality of this work.
When I looked at this page - BEST AND WORST real estate blogs - it reminded me that opinions are rarely accurate - they tend to be biased, and since Mary is founder of RSS Pieces (the company that created this review of various real estate blogsites), it made me curious - has her judgment been clouded by her bias? Perhaps... but this post is not about bias. And to be clear, I also have many biases - you'll see them here and in many of my posts. I'd like to stay on message by pointing out that the best and worst of anything really needs deeper introspection.
Consider (for example) her comment about Vail Property Search - a real estate blogsite that's been around for a few years.
"First, technically it’s a disaster- there are more than 51 HTML warnings and errors on the homepage of that blog. Secondly, this is an example of a site that is building its content almost primarily through RSS feeds. I like using RSS feeds to build content, but there is a limit. The problem with so many RSS feeds is that you don’t have unique copy that search engines will appreciate and frankly, the content is pretty boring and feels like it came right out of the local newspaper. Where there is custom content, it feels very contrived and corporate. Blogging is about having a conversation with an audience of one. You need to make it feel like you are talking directly to your visitors, not like you are giving a state of the union address. This is just a very boring blog."
The owners of Vail Property Search were among the first to experiment with the idea that connecting with customers through blogs might be a useful approach for reaching the long tail of search. Indeed, they have been successful - one broker landed an $8m condo sale to a person [of extreme influence] with a single post - it was a post describing the unique attributes of a new condo in Vail, Colorado. It was so unique, and the blog post so specific that it caused the personal assistant of the person [of extreme influence] to discover it easily in Google. Within days, a deal had been consummated and delivery of this new construction at Arrabell Vail will occur sometime in 2007. Rather than provide a link to the actual post, I'll let Google show you where it ranks for this particular blog. ;-)
Indeed, this blogsite is very successful if you measure the benefits that the brokerage has derived from it. Contrary to the evidence, however, Mary believes it is severely flawed - at both a technical level and content level. Movie critics have much in common with Mary - flaming a blockbuster film is a common occurence. ;-)
Specifically Mary calls out the 51 (or so) HTML validation errors on the blog's home page while ignoring the numerous errors on her own BEST AND WORST page. I don't have a problem with hypocrisy; we have plenty of that on a daily basis in US politics alone. But I do find it amusing when a self-professed best and worst site places foot in mouth; ahh, happy days indeed.
But lets get a little more serious about her assertions:
"this is an example of a site that is building its content almost primarily through RSS feed"
There are several hundred posts on this site (371 to be exact); there are about a half dozen inbound RSS feeds on this site. To describe this approach to RSS integration as comprised "almost primarily" seems an injustice. I would say that a proper characterization is "almost not even close to primarily". After all, who says that inbound syndication has a moral limit; RSS was intended to be syndicated and there are reasons all bloggers should do this. Blogrolls (in fact) are simply less technical approaches to the real goal - aggregate like-minded people into one spot to help users find diverse opintions about similar subjects. With Mary's extensive knowledge about Web 2.0, how could she miss this obvious benefit?
"technically a disaster"
Anyone with a blog editor [that supports HTML editing] may introduce HTML validation issues. All of the issues are related to content authored by the users, not the platform. Mary's RSS Pieces site (on the other had) includes validation issues related to Javascript which are more related to the platform technology. Again, an amusing oversight I suspect.
To the point of "boring" - perhaps this site is boring to some people, but it's apparently quite useful to many others. There's no shortage of things in this world that any of us could live without. But her assertion is subjective just as blogs are subjective. To me, the Vail Property Search blog is boring too, but to 3700 unique people, last week it was very interesting.
I could drone on about all the reasons this blogsite has a significant footprint of 2390 pages in Google while Mary's own blog is struggling to get 51 pages indexed, but that would be heavily biased; perhaps another day.
As you can tell, I have at least one bias - I don't like best and worst of anything because it's usually not a good indicator of goodness or necessarily badness. ;-)
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