Blogburst Update

One of the most exciting things about the "Web 2.0" are some of the great ideas and services that would not be possible without the enormous investments -- and great risks -- associated with the birth of the Internet. An an example, I offer up Blogburst, which was created to syndicate content from bloggers across the varied media spectrum. Although the Housing Chronicles blog signed up less than a week ago, to date the stories selected for syndication -- mostly by Reuters but also Fox News and Nielsen -- have resulted in nearly 200,000 headline impressions -- a level of awareness that would otherwise take an enormous amount of time and effort.

I've also had a chance to review where most of my traffic comes from, and that is also quite instructive: other than the regular readers in the building industry (and through promotions such as Builder & Developer magazine and their BuilderBytes newsletter), much of the balance comes from simple searches -- in most cases, Google (of course it helps that the blogging software I use is owned by Google, so most posts are almost immediately indexed). But I also get a lot of traffic from reciprocal links to other real estate-related blogs, such as Patrick.net (great for daily news links) and CalculatedRisk. Finally, since certain posts have been 'sphered' (indexed by a service that offers up related blog posts on various websites), more recently my traffic has been referred by the online version of the Wall Street Journal.

During downturns such as this, it's those companies which build their brands and invest in technology that will be in the best positions to benefit from the rebound. I'd like to see more builders and developers participate in Web 2.0 technologies because these days, you just don't know from where your next customer will come.