IBS Team Blog

Many of you know that I recently converted my old directory to a completely different platform, and now trying to get it all nice and as complete as I can. I started going through my state categories to make sure that all business listings have their information up to date. While visiting each site and updating my database, I found myself having to search for the most obvious (in my eyes) information. I don't know the reasons why these simple things are being left out... may be agents concentrate so much on a bigger picture, while missing

I was emailing back and forth with one of the Trulia employees and he shoot me a copy of an email that they mailed out to their members about new very cool feature named TruliaMap. I didn't find anything on this subject in their blog, so I think it is pretty fresh news.

How many times have you found yourself in the midst of a confusing situation because of a misunderstanding in email communication?

This year annual Inman Real Estate Connect conference is scheduled on June 26-28 in San Francisco. I never attended one, but I'd really like to especially since it's getting more interesting every year now. This years (July) featured speakers are:

• Craig Newmark, Founder & Customer Service Representative of the largest listing source on the Web, Craig's List


• Dave Liniger, Founder & CEO of the biggest real estate company in the world, RE/MAX

New great tool from Google Labs was mentioned yesterday in Google's Official Blog - Google Trends. Google Trends is a Search Volume Comparison Tool that allows to retrieve "some" historical search data and compare the search volumes between each other and corresponding news volume for the same queries. The comparison is made visually in form of graphs - no numbers provided. You can compare up to 5 keywords/phrases and dig into them by year/month and country.

At the end of February I wrote a post on Google Page Creator - just when Google released it. Well, 2 months later and a bit (today) I searched for my full name [Max Chirkov], just out of curiosity, and was very surprised to see my Google page ranking #2 just right below this site. Even more surprising is Google PageRank 4 for that page even though Google doesn't show any links pointing to it.

I just submitted two listings to Yahoo! Local - one Featured and one Enhanced, so now when I have some experience doing that I can clarify on the costs, which might be not even close to $25 a month. I think Yahoo!

Yahoo! Search Blog announced Local Featured Listings - advertisement that targets local search and appears in the highlighted top or bottom of the page whenever visitor searches for similar business in your area. Amount of Featured Listings is limited to 6, so I gotta buy a couple tomorrow for my brokers and hopefully HomeGain and the gang won't buy them all :) The "best" part about it is that Yahoo!

First time I got featured in Advanced Access (Real Estate Web Marketing company) newsletter as Featured Client of the month. It's kinda cool even though its very limited "recognition" (if I can say so). They called me and asked if I would like to give an interview.

Edgeio - true Web 2.0 Classifieds that was just released to wide public a couple of weeks ago (February 26th, 2006) . I think I visited them once but hasn't realized from the beginning what it was. Well, it happens (I guess). So, what is Edgeio? It is a Classifieds service, tool that crawls the Net and picks up classified listings and pretty much everything that has feeds and keeps them up to date.