I've started to see a pattern - the real estate industry is very data-centric; this is to say that most conversations and activities in real estate are based on information - lots of it, and very discrete in nature. For example, when helping a buyer, data elements such as price, number of bedrooms, location, distance to nearby public schools or college campuses are key elements of the discussion.
Blogs, however, are [by nature] very unstructured. A typical blog tool supports just two fields of information - a title, and a text post field. Some support keywords, maybe categories, and a few support more discrete ideas like link collections that support mime-types (i.e., declaring for example that a link is a specific type of link like a podcast). But for the most part, even these more advanced capabilities are woeful underachievers - they lack the power to create more discrete information that is more findable and more relevant.
Structured blogging is an alternative and perhaps the next evolutionary step for business blogs in general. It's not a new idea, but it is a good one. It's simple to understand as well - imagine a weblog that has fields for title, body, and keywords, but is also embellished with these additional fields:
- Property address
- # of bedrooms
- Price
- Financing options
- Home owners dues
- Proximity to beach
- Nearest college
These are each attributes that describe a property with greater clarity. As you all know it's very easy to describe a property in a blog post's text area, so why would you want to go to the trouble of entering this information in a more structured format?
The same question was asked in 1995 when businesses "marked up" their HTML ecommerce pages with data including such things as product names, prices, warrantee, availability, shipping cost, etc. The reasons for avoiding this behavior are numerous and by 1998 most companies had recognized that separating data elements from the presentation code provided great benefits. It's much easier to determine the meaning of information if it is not embedded in text. Blogs will follow a similar progression because businesses want to use blogs for specific use cases like a blog post about an event, or a post about someone important, or an article about hotels with the best golf deals. In this context it would be a blog post related to specific real estate data like price, location, etc.
Tagging, the idea of adding keywords to your posts to effectuate greater discovery through search and social netowrks, is a similar concept. By tagging documents in a specific way (such as Technorati's tagging model), you make it easier for these new Web 2.0 systems to find the tags on your page. Adding structure to your blogs is no different from tagging with one exception - keyword tags are a single dimension - they are just words describing what your post is about. Structured blogging is multi-demensional - it allows you to establish name-value pairs - this is techno-mumbo-jumbo for "data fields" much like you would find on a form.
A name-value pair for a homes selling price would be "Selling Price: $195,990". The name is "selling price" and the value is $195,990".
Some of the reasons you might want to "tag" posts with real estate-specific name-value pairs includes but is not limited to this list:
- All posts with real estate listing information is automatically uploaded to Google Base (Google Real Estate).
- All posts that contain real estate property data is searchable without seeing hits from posts that have no property-specific content.
- RSS readers that understand the usefulness of property-specific fields leverage that information to provide an improved customer experience.
- Property-specific data is delivered to search engines as more discrete information about the post, thus making it more recommendable for data-specific searches.
- Property-specific data can be leveraged more easily with web services such as Zillow, Trulia, and Edgeio
These are just a few of the examples why structured blogging will soon provide additional benefits to real estate blogging.
Currently there are no blog tools that support structured blogging natively. There are a few plugins listed for Wordpress and Moveable Type here. We (at MyST) started experimenting with structured content integrated through web services processes - our first such attempt was for eBay store data which has provided insight, but not significant success as yet. I think this is a useful idea for real estate, but I'd like to hear your thoughts.
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