IBS Team Blog

Social networking is all the rage nowadays on the web. The advent of "web 2.0" embraced interaction between surfers and websites. But is all that time and energy being put to good use? Today there are more social networking sites than ever. Every conceivable niche has a site for it. There are the biggies of course, Digg, Reddit, etc and then there are some up and comers targeting niches like Active Rain and Ziki.

Graywolf created pretty exstensive list of Wordpress plugins that will help you to improve your blog's SEO and usability. Check it out, I think it's well worth bookmarking.

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.

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!

A couple of days ago ajaxLaunch released a beta version of online word processor application called ajaxWrite. Pretty neat program even though it is very limited in its features. It is fast, has all the basic text formatting options and tools (I think the guys are still working on the Spell check option). The main feature is - ajaxWrite is compatible with Microsoft Word, in addition it can import and export into MS Works, Word Perfect, Open Office and others.

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.

The first time I saw Point2Homes implemented agents listings as RSS feeds binded together with Google Maps and Google Earth I was really impressed. What a great tool for real estate web sites!