I am experimenting with a new comment policy.  In the past, comments were moderated.

I have reset the comment settings to be un-moderated (in the WordPress sense), and I’ve removed some other restrictions as well.

These settings are subject to change in the future.   However, if everyone will please observe the following guidelines, I’m hoping I can leave them open and we’ll move forward toward more fruitful discussion.

Please Note The Following Guidelines:

• Real email addresses are required. Anonymous comments are not permitted.  We apologize for any inconvenience.
• No spam.  If you see an article here about foreclosures and you want to tell people about your nifty foreclosure site, don’t.  If you have something to say on the topic of what the article and your comment is interesting enough, they’ll click through on your name.  There’s some leeway if your site does not compete with ours and is truly an informational resource, but see the note on the opaqueness of the algorithm, below.
• Disagree gently.  Though we try hard to be patient and have forbearance because it is one of the ten paramitas, the moderator(s) are sensitive people, with an unfortunate bad habit of working out their insecurities using the delete key.  Like the Google algorithm, the relationship of your civility to our patience is a black box.  We’re working on improving the latter.  Please work on the former as much as you can.
• Real names are preferred.  A real name takes the form:  “John Smith”, not “Alabama Luxury Condos”.  The “nofollow” tag gives no benefit to the latter anyway, so why not pull up a chair and tell us who you are?

And Finally… THANK YOU …

for your participation here and for helping us create an interesting discussion!  We appreciate you reading us!

Well, this post is sort of a mixed bag.  On the one hand, it’s a heads up about Maureen Francis’ article about FHA, Foreclosures and Foregiveness.

Under the hood, it’s more of a test post.  I’m writing this post from out a new browser, Flock, which I learned about through the Web 2.0 list of Web 2.0 Links.  (I think that title was written by someone who works in the Department of Redundancy Dept.)  Anyway, this new browser, Flock, is interesting in that it contains integrated blogging tools and an RSS reader with, and can detect whether a page you’ve landed on has a feed, among other handy Web 2.0ish tricks.

The blogging tool is fairly primitive once you’re used to Livewriter, but it’s interesting that it all hangs together.

Blogged with Flock

I’ve been digging a lot into real estate social networks recently, and also looking into open source software to run such a network.

There are already several such networks making their way in the world.  ActiveRain is probably the most popular, but other sites that have beaten the one I haven’t done yet through the gate include RealEstateWebmasters (which didn’t really start out as a social network, but has started to grow in that direction) and WannaNetwork.

Wannanetwork (which I just joined this morning by way of testing) is especially interesting to me given that it’s:

• Running on one of the open source platforms I’m looking into (Drupal).
• Run by a Realtor®, and one who seems to be getting some benefit out of doing so.

Today I started trying to get my head around the software, but I don’t have too much to show for it yet.

I’ll let you know if I start to sense something more than just a bad case of projectitis and something starts looking deliverable.

Meantime I’m very curious to hear from those of you who are active on ActiveRain, etc. as to what you’d like to see in a real estate social network, what features are your favorites on existing networks, what your experiences have been, etc.

In the last couple of days, I’ve been answering the phones again and emails again, working to pick up a buyer / seller or two myself.  I guess I felt I needed to get out there and enjoy some of that invigorating Sacramento July weather.

Everyone outside of maybe Phoenix should find that ironic.

In between calls, I had the pleasure of watching Bruce Willis blow stuff up (John gives this movie two thumbs up).

Also, in the fine mad-scientist tradition, I arrive back from the lab with my face only slightly burnt and exploded to report on my Web 2.0 experiments.

1. I’ve actually published the Web 2.0 John Lockwood Profile that I had earlier threatened to write.  There’s probably a Web 2.0 application to be written that’s just the ultimate aggregator of all your other Web 2.0 junk.  I’m sure Ben Franklin felt much like this when he wired up his kite to the printing press for Poor Richard’s Almanac.
2. I’ve begun a Squidoo Lens consisting of a list of Sacramento Area Bloggers. 
3. Using Yahoo pipes, I’ve created an aggregate web feed from our five most active Elite Properties blogs, and published it here.

Those of you who were waiting for Part III of the Article Series on My Love Hate Relationshiop with Web 2.0 (See Part II or Part I), please note we’ve moved the series to a more Web 2.0-ish sort of Place, ActiveRain, and so Part III is here, where I was gratified to see it as a featured article.  I guess ambvialence is something people can really get behind (well, maybe not).

Meantime, spreadsheet mavens, worry not, we haven’t forgotten about you, and we now have the latest roundup of the May Numbers, albeit a little bit late.

Coming Next…

I’ve avoided using del.icio.us for a long time.  Actually I think more than anything I’ve avoided typing del.icio.us for a long time.  That’s got to be as ugly a word as you can think of to type.

There’s a trend in the Web 2.0 world toward ugly words.  It’s almost as though nothing happens at all if the word isn’t butt-ugly:  Blog.  del.icio.us. Mashup.

I mean:  who are we writing for?  Germans?  Why can’t our Web 2.0 words be prettier, like French words?  Je ne sais pourquoi pas!

Anyway, be not afraid.  For purposes of this article I’ve stuck del.icio.us into the clipboard.  Easy.

As much as I hate typing del.icio.us, I love using it, now that I’ve given it a spin.  I’m using it extensively to plan out and execute the work for my new map project blog, and after doing this, I’m not sure how I ever blogged without it!  The feature I like best for this purpose is the ability to subscribe to one or more tags.  In the case of the Sacramento Map Project, for example, I subscribe to “Sacramento”, “Maps”, Mashup”, “GPS” and the like, and every so often go into the subscription page to see what folks are linking to.

The next step is to view those pages, see if there’s anything cool to write about, and either go write about it now, or tag it for later.  A tag can be anything, of course, so for things I want to write about I use “Map_Todo” as a reminder to myself to write about it on my map blog.  I’ve already written one blog entry that I would never have even learned the background for if I hadn’t been digging further into categories.  There’s something about going after “tags” as opposed to keywords that seems to be more conducive to the creative process.  Conceptually they’re pretty similar, of course, so perhaps it’s just the fact that you’re statistically more likely to bump into something that other people have found interesting.

Next thing you know, you’ve got fifteen things to blog about and a bunch of bookmarks to remind you how to get back to those fifteen things.

What’s not to love?

By the way, if you want to check out my bookmarks, here’s where to go:  http://del.icio.us/JohnLockwood.