Pat at Transparent Real Estate wrote today about Google’s new mapping functionality and pointed out how brokerages can take advantage of these tools to create some novel applications. One of the new functions is the ability to add customized markers. This allows site visitors to clearly and instantly understand what is being offered by looking directly at the map. Pat also believes that there should be more functionality in the infowindow itself. For example imagining clicking on the marker and opening a slew of click to action options such as chat, call and email. Pat has a great visual of what this would look like and we’ve annotated the idea with additional linkages to specific click to action pages here.

Why is this important ? Sometimes site visitors just want to talk or chat with a live person immediately after searching around the web for hours for information. Instant communication tools such as Meebo, Plugoo, and JAXTR allow exactly just that - the ability to instantly communicate with someone without having to wait for email or contact form responses.

Does this sound like a lot of work ? Well we’ve made it super easy! All of Realivent’s websites and blogs are now pre-installed with Meebo, Plugoo and JAXTR. All you have to do is copy your widget code into your site’s “CHAT” option page. Like this:

Also, you only have to do this once. For example, if you create 20 single property sites with us, then you only have to configure your page for the first site and we’ll do it for you automatically each time thereafter.

If you are listing your website anywhere where you want to give prospects the ability to instantly talk to you just point them over to your new communications page using this link: MYCHATPAGE

Here’s a sample, enjoy!

Popularity: 55% [?]

We just installed Google Translator on our sidebar. Now you can read our blog posts in Arabic, Chinese, French, Korean, Portugese, Russian and many more languages by clicking on the country’s flag. This is also available on all of our single property and agent blogs.

Why is this important ? Well first of all when we introduced our product in San Jose, CA the first comment was “this is a great product, do you have your product in Spanish ?” We didn’t have a solution at that time, but with more and more widgets now available for your websites, it was easy to find a solution. I recalled using Babelfish several years ago, but I could not find any widgets (a couple of months ago ) that allowed you to embed the translation tools directly on your site.

Here’s the code to install the translator on your site: (http://labnol.blogspot.com/2005/11/add-language-translation-to-website.html“>Courtesy of Digital Inspiration)

Popularity: 51% [?]

I recently ran across Animoto, a new ultra hip slide show creation site which was reviewed at  Sellsius the Real Estate Blog Lab and GeekeStateBlog.  After seeing some of Sellsius's and Dave's creations I set out to mix one myself.  Here's what I came up with:

This is an ultrafast and upbeat style tour which I would say would be the perfect tempo for homebuyers who are always on the go. The best places to showcase these tours would be in Facebook or Myspace. I have had a lot of experience with video editing tools such as Adobe Premiere, Sony Vegas, and Final Cut and I could put together these slideshows myself from scratch, but it would take me hours instead of minutes. This is where Animoto rocks! It took me only 10 minutes to get a slideshow produced and online. I even put it on our Single Property Website demo here. The production flow is simple and the rendering time is decent. Another neat feature is it allows you to upload your own soundtrack for further customization.

Pricing is not that bad either:

This was produced using the 30-sec version, but you can get longer shows for $30/yr.

Since this is so easy to create, you might want to make it anyways even if you already have another virtual tour created for your primary sites. This allows you to segment your market by showing different tours to different customer groups.

Start a tour now and enjoy!

Popularity: 40% [?]

I have been playing around with Touchgraph, a cool visual analytics tool that can quickly give you the Big Picture of important sites recognized by Google for certain keywords. It also shows you visually the relationships between sites that link to each other.

The help section explains how this works:

"Searching for a keyword will retrieve the top 10 pages matching that keyword, and the top 10 similar pages for each of those pages"

I ran a series of queries on keywords that I was familiar with and the results are indeed visually accurate.

Here are some fun sample queries:

Search term: "Real Estate Technology"

The top 10 clusters:

Future of Real Estate Marketing
NAR
RealEstateToolBox
Computer Camp
Real Estate Technology News
Retipub.com
Amazon.com/
MyTechOpinion
RealtyStar
RealEstate.About.com

Search term: "Zillow"

The top 10 clusters:

Zillow
Zillow
Zillow
ZillowBlog
Techcrunch
Techcrunch
BloodhoundRealty
Techdirt.com
Wikipedia
WallStreetJournal

Here are some hyper-local queries:

Search term: "palo alto real estate"

The top 10 clusters:

Trulia
PaloAltoOnline
PaloAltoOnline
PaloAltoOnline
Topix.net
Relo-Experts.com
Yahoo
Yahoo
3OceansRE
3OceansRE

Search term: "los altos real estate"

Search term: "cupertino real estate"

There's much more to it than this…you can run reports, analyze the results for patterns and use it as a powerful analytics tool…

Try it here at Touchgraph

Popularity: 41% [?]

Last Christmas Trang and I both got new laptops, They both came Vista Ready but had XP installed. We both sent in for the upgrade. Trang received her upgrade about 3 weeks later, but mine is still missing, and to tell you the truth, I don't want it.

I installed Vista on Trang's Laptop the same day she got it. Remember this is a "Vista Ready" laptop, and should run fine, with no problems. It has been a complete nightmare…as far as computers go.

The short list of problems: 

1. The Video camera on her laptop does not work anymore…no drivers available as of yet
2. The sound to the headphones doesn't work, but the speakers are fine
3. The Areo windows have to be turned off to use Winforms which makes the desktop look aweful
4. It is incredibly slow…

that's not a lot but Trang doesn't do a lot on it either, except for use Winforms and the headphones. I Was so disappointed with the release of Vista that I decided to go with Linux as a Desktop again…this time with Ubuntu
If you thought vista looked Cool, check this out:

I play with the new Ubuntu Desktop and get blown away. First because it is free, and secondly because it is awesome. It comes with everything. Open Office suite, Video editing, Feed Readers, etc… I've got it sharing the printers and files. this is the first release that I can honestly say, "Now is the time, to move to linux"

my other blog http://mattdunlap.smartlegacy.com has a lot ore entries on Ubuntu.

Popularity: 17% [?]

I remember last year at SF Connect, Rich Barton got a personal Zestimate… It was a while ago so I can't remember the details of his "Estimation of Value" but it was a funny little joke during the "10 things Zillow learned about real estate" session.

Well, how about this for a Zestimate:

Roger Clemens, the newest Yankee signed a 1 year $28 Million dollar deal a couple days ago.

 He agreed to a one-year contract for $28,000,022 — the last two digits matching his uniform number — that will start when he is added to the major league roster for his first start, most likely in three to four weeks. Clemens will earn about $18.5 million under the deal, which will cost the Yankees approximately $7.4 million in additional luxury tax, meaning they are investing about $26 million in a seven-time Cy Young Award winner who will turn 45 in August.

Let's break this down.

• Per month: $4.5 million
• Per Day: $147,541
• Per Hour: $6,147.54
• Per Minute: $102.46
  thanks to Espn news for these stats

It will be fun to see how much he earns per pitch. being that he is not a reliever, he will probably throw around 70-80 an average.

If Roger wrote this post, it would be worth about $3,000

Of course when Oscar De La Hoya reads this post, he will just laugh. Rumors estimated his Saturday Boxing Event netted him $40 Million 

Popularity: 15% [?]

I ran across this while waiting for my Iced Venti Americano*, at Starbucks. Dilbert has always been up there as one of my favorite comics. I read the comic and gave myself a reminder to try to find the comic on the internet so I could post the image. I should set a reminder to fix my inner reminder schedule because it is running a little late. I just now did a search for that Dilbert comic and had to search through the archives to get it.

Click on it to view full size. 

Sooo true…

Dilbert is awesome, he never let's you down. I like their website and you can subscribe to a daily comic feed.

Here is another Dilbert blogging cartoon…your blog is an embarrassment  

The Dilbert website is here 

to subscribe to Dilbert or about `50 other daily email comic strips go here: comics.com 

* An Iced Venti Americano is 4 shots and water with ice. The current price is $2.35 (except for on the Las Vegas strip, where the price is roughly $5.00) which makes this drink by far the most economic "bang for your buck" at Starbucks. The ice allows you to take a mighty swig right when you get it for an immediate rush of caffeine. I have 2 a day because after 5 years of drinking it, 1 does nothing to me. I think the only way to get more caffeine inside your body in the same amount of time is a coffee enema, which is frowned upon while still at Startbucks.

Popularity: 17% [?]

When Project Blogger started a couple weeks ago, I wasn't too excited. Blogging is pretty hard and you have to get into the groove before it starts becoming a lot of fun. Most bloggers start and less then 4 months (if that) are done and moving onto something else.I thought it was a good idea, but will probably fizzle out

Was I wrong…These guys are in it to win it! 

Drew of Zillow, put out a call for a Zillow wordpress plugin…we responded, and I programmed my butt off to get turn one out for him. I was never far from my computer during that period.

Picture courtesy of TechRepublic

We gave it to Drew, he installed it on his apprentices blog…few bugs when the property is not in Zillow, but over all I think it is a great plugin, and when we release it, I think a lot of agents will benefit from it.

As soon as Drew blogged about, we started getting emails requesting it.

Here is an email from Jeff Turner

"Just read about the Zestimate Plugin and would love access to it for my project blogger apprentice as well. Thanks, Jeff Turner"

Then I responded:

Then Jeff Came out of nowhere with this:

"Matt,

Then no one would be able to use it….

Popularity: 16% [?]

It's late and I've been programming all day…Then I run across this. I gotta go to bed before I go crazy

Popularity: 12% [?]

I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit this but I have neglected my self on the internet and it has come around to bite me in the ass. Well no more! Your online profile is very important, after all you are a brand, and you should market your self accordingly.

My name is Matt Dunlap (Matt#1 for future reference) and if you do you search for me on Google you probably run across all kinds of impersonators. This scares me, especially since many employers are no doing background checks on the internet before they hire potential employees.

In a 2006 survey by executive search firm ExecuNet in Norwalk, Conn., 77 of 100 recruiters said they use search engines to check out job candidates. In a CareerBuilder.com survey of 1,150 hiring managers last year, one in four said they use Internet search engines to research potential employees. One in 10 said they also use social networking sites to screen candidates. In fact, according to Search Engine Watch, there are 25 million to 50 million proper-name searches performed each day.
Source: Computerworld.com

For example, a quick search for Matt Dunlap will bring up this guy…He says he's name is Matt Dunlap, but we really don't know.

Matt delivers a warm, friendly voice for all your voiceover needs. His voice is perfect for your project whether it's a radio or TV commercial, industrial presentation, multimedia CD, game, web audio or book on tape.  He can deliver a range from "man on the street" to "announcer" to "soft spoken" depending on your needs. He is frequently compared to Tom Brokaw by friends and acquaintances.

Not bad…he seems like a professional guy. I don't think any employer will have a second thought about me if they run across matt#2

Then we get to matt dunlap #3 at AmericanSingles.com, The second result in google…This guy is going to ruin my life!

Don't get me wrong I feel sorry for guy, after all nobody likes women that hit you, but come on dude, think about the other Matt Dunlap's out there. On a side note, I like how he is looking for a friend or JUST A LONG TERM RELATIONSHIP.

At least I come up first on Flickr, when searching for Matt Dunlap. Unfortunately, a few pages into it you run across this…not good for me! That can easily be mistaken as me, and I'm 75 percent sure it's not me, even though I've been there… We all have, just admit it!

So as you can see I'm on shaky ground for any interview process. I'm giving myself 3 months to become the most downloaded highest ranking Matt Dunlap on the internet. If I can't do it, I can always hire a professional

A great brand can take months, if not years, and millions of dollars to build. It should be the thing you hold most precious. Don’t let even one negative blog comment go unnoticed, call Andy Beal today to discuss an online reputation management strategy that matches your company’s needs.

Popularity: 19% [?]