Ed: Today we hand the Zillow Blog over to a guest blogger. The event is the Yankee Blog Swap, and 28 bloggers have agreed to switch blogs for a day. We’re paired with Pat Kitano whose posts about Transparent Real Estate are always insightful. Over to to Pat:
- Self-expressive – blogs, Myspace , Youtube , link sharing > defining the individual
- Relationship – Linkedin , Active Rain , MyBlogLog , Second Life, online gaming > defining the society
- Collaborative – wikis, Digg , Real Estate Voices > defining the collective knowledge of the masses
Obviously, there are overlaps. Blogs and wikis both perform self-expressive functions, but self expression on the current “how-to” and “what-is-this” type of informational wikis like Wikipedia , WikiHow and Faqfarm is conceptually limited to the “truth” or variations of it.
Here’s my point: wikis have not quite evolved to their mass audience potential because they have been limited by their current role as authoritative information sources. Real estate wikis in particular now have the opportunity to change how the wiki might be used in the future.
Compare the present day blog with the present day wiki:
| Blogs | Wikis | |
| Content | Informational, topical, personal, biased | Encyclopedic information source |
| Audience | Specific (sticky) to the blogger as provider of insight. Subscribes to RSS feed. | Used like a reference desk. No reasons to subscribe. |
| Social networking function | Promote conversation between and among individual contributors | Promote collaborative authoring of topics and are read as authoritative |
| Ease of setup | Easy and therefore multiplying | Wiki tools (Socialtext ) are now low cost of entry |
One key difference between blogs and wikis is their readers’ stickiness to the site. Blogs are daily news, wikis are encyclopedias. Millions of blogs contribute content daily, wikis have far fewer contributors because it’s hard to add more content to an encyclopedia. (Exercise: try editing a Wikipedia article– you will find that they can already be fairly comprehensive.)
How can wikis become more interactive? To do this, wikis need to function more like collective blogs where contributors can comment topically on subjects that their readers want to follow. Real estate wikis are natural for developing a critical mass of ongoing contributors because local content- the market, the neighborhoods – is dynamic and always changing. As with blogs, daily contributors attract loyal audiences.
For example, incorporating a wiki into a google map mashup would allow granular real estate commentary – tagged by pushpins – down to the zip code or listing (so the map doesn’t get too messy, the commentary could be archived). Another text based method is Zillow’s Real Estate Wiki, which provides a section where bloggers can add localized information about their
market by State. When real estate wikis begin attracting expert postings by the vast pool of local real estate professionals, they will develop a dynamic audience that the standard “ask a question, get an answer” type wiki now lacks.
| Localized Real Estate Wikis | |
| Content | Local information source contributed by local real estate professionals |
| Audience | Local audience researching property market |
| Social networking function | Enables the lead generating relationships real estate professionals prize |
| Ease of setup | Easy setup should grow wiki population |