Marin County Real Estate

Blogging and Real Estate     Finally, a forum/methodology for the Professional Realtor and the General Public to exchange ideas in a healthy virtual enviroment.  This will benefit the real estate industry’s relationship with the public by allowing a Town Hall like atmosphere for the free exchange of ideas while providing information that conventional media formats have been unable or unwilling to provide.     What is a weblog? A weblog, or blog, is a personal journal on the web. Weblogs express as many different subjects and opinions as there are people writing them. Some blogs are highly influential and have enormous readership while others are primarily intended for a close circle of family and friends.      The power of weblogs is that they allow millions of people to easily publish their ideas, and millions more to comment on them. Blogs are a fluid, dynamic medium, more akin to a ‘conversation’ than to a library — which is how the Web has often been described in the past. With an increasing number of people reading, writing, and commenting on blogs, the way we use the Web is shifting in a fundamental way. Instead of being passive consumers of information, more and more Internet users are becoming active participants.     This is why the blogging phenomenon and other forms of unfettered expression on the Web is often called the rise of the participant economy.      A few years ago, Web search was revolutionized by a simple but profound idea — that the relevance of a site can be determined by the number of other sites that link to it, and thus consider it ‘important.’ In the world of blogs, hyperlinks are even more significant, since bloggers frequently link to and comment on other blogs, which creates the sense of timeliness and connectedness one would have in a conversation. So Technorati tracks the number of links, and the perceived relevance of blogs, as well as the real-time nature of blogging. Because Technorati automatically receives notification from weblogs as soon as they are updated, it can track the thousands of updates per hour that occur in the blogosphere, and monitor the communities (who’s linking to whom) underlying these conversations.There are about 75,000 new blogs a day. Bloggers update their weblogs regularly; there are about 1.2 million posts daily, or about 50,000 blog updates an hour.A BRIEF HISTORY OF BLOGS1997            The term “Weblog” was coined by Jorn Barger, editor of the blog Robot Wisdom on December 171999            April/May   Peter Merholz, who blogs at peterme.com is the first to use the verb ‘blog’ by dividing the                     weblog in the words, “we blog”                    August/ a tiny company in San Francisco called Pyra Labs creates Blogger.  It is the first internet of                     based, free, and easy to use blog creation tools that will spark the explosive growth of the                    Blogosphere.                    December/   Rusty Foster debuts Scoop.  This open source “collaborative media application”                     allows the reader of a web site to also produce its content.  Markos Moulitsas Zuniga will later                    use it to transform DailyKos from an individual blog into a mega-community web site.2000            November/ freelance journalist Josh Marshall starts TalkingPointsMemo in the midst of the 2000                     election recount controversy2002            May/ Moulitsas begins blogging at DailyKos.  He is one of the many political bloggers who begin                    self-publishing in response to the 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq.                    November: David Sifry founds Technorati, a real time search engine that tracks what’s going on                    in the Blogosphere.2003            March/ The Oxford English Dictionary includes the word weblog and we-blogger.      2004            January/ Ana Marie Cox launches Wonkette, which dishes D.C. gossip. Wonkette belongs to         Gawker                    Media, an online company founded by Nick Denton and considered to be the most visible and                     successful blog orientated media company.