Ordering one of our Hosting/Marketing packages is easy and fast. You can have your site up and rolling in just a few hours.

Web services are still really big at Microsoft. I can't wait for the public releases of Indigo to make this all much easier to do. On the MSDN and SDK teams there has been a lot of talk about exposing web services, adopting RSS as a standard syndication mechanism, etc.  I distinctly remember in the V1 .NET Framework when Jeff Richter worked with Jim Gray to create the TerraServer web services.  This is really a great use of a simple API backed by a huge system that provides real value that you would never want to try to build yourself. Looks like they are still up at http://terraservice.net/webservices.aspx  The API is pretty much the same as in 2000... that is goodness!!

Google seems to have a pretty straight forward set of APIs via a web service too.  http://www.google.com/apis/  It is great to see them support VB with their samples.  I can't seem to find the MSN Search web services...maybe someone can point me to them.

Where are you successfully using web services?

What are the next big ideas for the services in the consumer space?

Thoughts, rants, and raves welcomed. -Bret

I've now got ShoZu on my Nokia 6630 setup to easily send video to my blip.tv account*. Lots of Gnomedex video going up.

Most fun was lamenting about the lack of Nokia smartphones to buy here in North America with Bre Pettis (someone *needs* to give Bre a phone for his Phonetagger alter-ego) and Will Pate. Short story here is: Nokia, forget about buzz marketing to give away phones -- there are people that just want to *buy* your high end phones.

Watch the Video

And I'm going to repeat what I said to Nokia before about encouraging carriers (especially in Canada):

My top hint on what Nokia should do? Forget the free phones: continue to sell great phones, but pressure Fido and Rogers to offer a "citizen journalism" data package so people in Canada can use all the cool features. The HipTop plan from Fido is $25/month for unlimited data...I think there would be a ton of people that would pay that to be able to upload pictures to Flickr on the fly and use all of the other great features that Nokia phones can enable (*cough* ShoZu *cough*).

read more:

Greg Narain and I had a long discussion with the Jive Live team at BarCamp San Francisco. They take high quality video of all sorts of live events, from art openings to the Pride Parade here in SF, and then post it to their website. In some ways they think of themselves as a daily video newspaper.

We talked about using blogs and RSS and existing video communities to spread their content everywhere, to get traffic going to their site. They currently host their own videos, and Greg and I were of the opinion that as soon as they actually got significant traffic, their video costs would start going through the rough. The difficulties of success when it comes to video content on the Internet today...

A large part of the discussion centered around what we all would and would not do on the Internet, including talking about who subscribes to RSS, uses tags, etc. As I have said time and again, feel free to ignore the small part of the population that uses these tools directly....just stick the functionality on to your site, and the structured nature of RSS, the tag glue, and the automated tools and aggregators that are in place will blast your content around the Internet, which has the net effect of raising your Google ranking, which is really how everyone finds stuff on the Internet today. RSS = higher search ranking, enough said.

GoogleWeek is going very well, but there is one feature of Gmail that I just couldn’t wait to mention.

Here it is

When I reply to a message that I sent, Gmail is smart enough to address the reply to the original recipient(s) of the message — not to me.

In more detail

I frequently send email, and then reply to my own email as a way of following up on my original note. In Apple Mail (and every other email client I’ve used), the reply is addressed to me — which is not very useful. The kind folks at Google were smart enough to recognize this use case and make it work right. (And by “right” I mean “the way I want.”)

Bravo!

Om Malik posted a great conversation starter entitled Attack of the You Tube Clones, talking about all the video sites that are out there now from the "majors".

AOL just announced Uncut Video, their own version of online video sharing ala You Tube. (Read Mashable’s take on it.) Niall Kennedy says that Yahoo is working on something similar as well, and said so in its analyst day meeting with the financial analysts. Niall says that “The new video site includes videos from around the web and a few from Yahoo! users as well.”

With Google Video and MySpace Video already up and running, I wonder what are the exits for companies like You Tube and other such services? Will someone buy YouTube for its traffic? What are your thoughts on this?

The bits of setting up a video sharing service are fairly simple. Or at least, the Web 2.0 tech platform for running a community website. Of course the Drupal framework can be used as one example (this story about Bryght in the Saskatoon Star Phoenix apparently quotes Roland as saying we'll build a clone of MySpace for $100K), but Ruby on Rails or any other decent web framework can be used to easily build web applications/community sites.

Michael van Swaaij, eBay's chief strategy officer, told a conference of software developers here on Saturday of plans to allow eBay's army of auctioneers to run contextual ads on other Web sites in exchange for a cut of the resulting eBay sales.

EBay's system differs from existing pay-per-click advertising systems offered by Google and rivals Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp. by linking only to eBay auctions rather than serving as a generic advertising network.

The world's largest e-commerce site said it plans to provide hundreds of thousands of eBay auctioneers with simple snippets of code they can embed on other Web sites that showcase items that are for sale on eBay's site.

A test of the program, dubbed eBay AdContext, is set to be introduced early next week, Swaaij said. What goods appear in any particular advertisement will be determined by the keywords on that Web page, a technique known as contextual advertising.

Starting right now (imagine a finger-snapping sound) I am beginning a week-long experiment to see if Google can successfully run my email, calendar, stocks, weather and other personal information needs.

Here’s the plan, tool by tool. Wish me luck.

Camino

Google doesn’t make it, but it’s integral to this experiment. Since Safari is only half-supported by Google, and I can’t stand Firefox for anything but web development and debugging, Camino’s a great choice. It’s my dedicated “Google Browser,” chrome-free and tabbed-up as you can see here.

Gmail

I’ve been forwarding my mail through Gmail for a long time, but only recently have I considered using it as my primary mail client. (Matt Haughey inspired me to give it a try.) I’m finding it easy to explain away old excuses and relearn shortcuts and techniques. If this experiment is successful, I’ll switch completely — ending a four-year love affair with Mail.app. Possible? We’ll see.

Google Calendar

My dissatisfaction with calendars goes way back. A month ago, I jumped the iCal ship and boarded 30boxes. I love 30boxes — it’s just about perfect — but Google’s offering matches 30boxes feature-by-feature, provides a draggable events interface, and is integrated with other services I use all the time. And since it’s hosted by Google, Calendar is almost always up and it’s very speedy.

Google Finance

Stock quotes are not as important as email or calendaring, but I spend a lot of time here and it warrants a spot in my personal G-Suite. I love just about everything about Google Finance — the super-clean portfolio view, the interactive charts and the time-aligned news.

Google Search (for everything else)

Did you know Google does weather? And movie times? And local listings? And a million other things? As I learn about new Google functionality, I find myself relying more and more on the search engine (remember when Google was just a search engine?) for all kinds of day-to-day needs.

See you in a week

Time permitting, I’ll post the verdict in a week. In the meantime, feel free to share your thoughts and experiences.

It’s been 11 days since I started my Google experiment, and I’m ready to declare it a success on all fronts. Not only did Gmail, Calendar, Finance, Search (and my browser of choice, Camino) live up to expectations, but I discovered some features and found the whole experience liberating and efficient.

Here’s a recap — tool by tool, again.

Camino

This little sharp-shooter didn’t miss a beat as my home base for email, calendering, stock quotes, and other daily information needs. In addition to the Google products that I was officially evaluating during this experiment, I ended up leaving Basecamp (for work) and Backpack open in Camino most of the time too. It was nice to have all of this information in one spot.

(Techie sidebar: Unlike Firefox and Safari, Camino’s memory footprint stayed nice and small over the course of the week. Even now, after running non-stop for 11 days, it’s using 581 MB of virtual memory and 85 MB of real memory. Not bad!)

Gmail

Did you know that Gmail has keyboard shortcuts? I didn’t. Other pleasant surprises include smart reply behavior, excellent handling of attachments and great built-in search (okay, that’s not a surprise, but it is pleasant!).

Perhaps the only downside to Gmail was getting weird looks from my co-workers. (Them: “You’re one of those now?”) Guess I’ll have to get used to it, because I’m fully converted! So long, Mail.app; it’s been fun.

Google Calendar

All around, Google Calendar feels like a nice step up from 30boxes. I barely used the Quick Add feature, instead opting to drag my events into place the “old-fashioned” way. I also appreciate the custom view (mine’s five days), Gmail integration and snappy performance at all times of the day and night.

Everything else

• I ended up using Google Local/Maps a lot more than anticipated. One handy feature is the ability to send business info (from Google Local) to your phone.
• Speaking of Maps — I used a couple of Google Maps Mashups a lot in the past week. Gmaps Pedometer is an oldie but goodie for figuring out how far I rode, and Yelp’s Maptastic is killer for finding a place to eat in a certain part of town.

All in all, a resounding success. Bravo Google! Imagine if they could apply this kind of innovation and quality to their advertising business… then they’d have something. (Kidding.)

For those of you playing along at home — how did it go? Any grand successes or failures?

Late, late, late on a Tuesday night almost two weeks ago, we re-launched FeedBurner.com with much-needed updates to the design, content and overall direction.

Traci already commented on the strategic importance of the new site, while Rachelle provided a more personal account.

But as the designer and half-developer (Rachelle did the other half — actually, probably more than half — with great skill and speed), I’m going to share a couple of “behind the scenes” details that I find super neat. Hopefully you’ll feel the same way.

Powered By FeedBurner

Going in to this project, two requirements became clear:

1. Traci (our marketing director) needed the ability to make content updates without routing all changes through the design team.

2. Many types of content needed to be reused in slightly different settings and formats around the site.

To address these requirements, we came up with the idea of modular content — basically, little nuggets of content that can be randomized, subscribed, inserted and updated anywhere.

For a couple of content types — blog posts, publisher buzz, press releases — we used feeds and our very own BuzzBoost service to repurpose content wherever we needed it on the site (mmm, dog food). For others, we generated custom blocks of static HTML or Javascript and included those in the JSPs that contain forms, session information (“You are signed in as…”) and other application components.

Of course, we had to generate all of this content somewhere…

Powered By MovableType

We’re using MovableType to store and publish the press releases, in the news, events, corporate backgrounder, stats, Publisher Buzz, and of course our blog, Burning Questions. Our MovableType installation is rigged up with a variety of templates that publish static files in HTML, Javascript and Atom formats — all of which are then pulled into the pages like I mentioned above.

One of the complaints people have about MovableType — that it creates static files by default — is actually a huge advantage here. We’re able to publish flat, lightweight static files to a single server, then pull in these files in a variety of ways across our distributed server environment.

Elegant, dual-float layout

When I was first learning CSS, doing multi-column layouts was always the hardest part. Even two-column layouts seemed tricky, weighing the pros and cons of various approaches and never being totally satisfied with the end result.

Then I got floats. Like, really got them. It was Doug Bowman’s slides from this presentation that secured my understanding and I haven’t fretted about CSS layouts since.

On the new FeedBurner.com, everything but the home page uses a classic dual-float, two-column layout. I set a width on both columns in the CSS, then assigned float:left on the left column and float:right on the right. Finished with a clear:both footer, it’s a solid layout that works regardless of which column is longest.

A new approach to navigation

While many sites feature massive navigation (practically a site map), we took a page from Flickr’s design books this time around and divided our navigation into two sections. A high-priority “primary” navigation and a lower-priority “secondary” navigation are based on prominence, not hierarchy, which helps focus the page and not overwhelm people with choices.

We also made heavy use of in-text hyperlinking across sections, to encourage exploration without forcing folks to grok and traverse our site architecture via the navigation.

Coming soon

Perhaps the best things to come out of this redesign process haven’t arrived yet. As a result of our extensive brainstorming and planning, we have tons of ideas and a general roadmap for web site improvements over the coming months.

And now, with the addition of Rachelle Bowden to our team, we have the manpower womanpower to get it done.

Questions? Comments?

Use the comment form. As always, I love to hear from you!

The Weblogs, Inc. network features over 100 independent, unfiltered bloggers producing over 1,000 blog posts a weekacross over 75 industry-leading blogs. Each week we ask our bloggers to choose their top posts, which we bring to youin one easy-to-read weekly post. You’ll find links to the hottest posts from the past week after the jump including areview of Google Talk, the latest television spoilers and a Flash-based gas pump. But first up is our newest blog,SlashFood. Enjoy.

Slashfood just opened for business, and we’re already planning aGrilled Cheese party. PlusKarina Longworth makes fun of Gwyneth Paltrow’sjunk food intoleranceand Keith McDuffee lists thetop 25 food hacks.

FlashInsider’sMike Schleifstein finds RentACoder looking for aFlash-based gas pump andrips into Kottke.org forforgetting Flashduring a future OS article, plus David Robinson reportson making the Adobe-Macromediamerger official.

Divester?sWilly Volk reports on theshark that killed a scuba diver, drools overthe Neptus 60 Cliff Dwelling, and lusts forthe coolest pool toy of all time ? the AquaPub.

Droxy’s RyanSaghir gets a hands on view of the new SiriusS50 and a sneak peek at the Sirius Replaythen he takes a look atconverting RSS feeds intoPodcasts with Audiolicious.

HD Beat’s MattBurns brings you up to speed on the HD-DVDand Blu-Raywar while Kevin C. Tofel reveals howVOOM HDTV is reborn and illustrateswhat you’re missing if you don’t have a widescreenset.

TVSquad’s BobSassone yearns for an Eyes DVDwhile Keith McDuffee rounds up thelatest spoilers and
rumors and Karina Longworth reports on aSpike TV movie.

Luxist’s Peter Thompson finds alittle chic protection for his iPod and Rick Reed shows agreat way to break your diet while Deidre Woollard checksout the customized Piaget Fingerprint Watch.

The VoIP Weblog chronicals thelaunch of Google Talk while TedWallingford rants about VoIP industry analysts’ screwyanalysis.

The Unofficial Photoshop Weblog’s David Chartier covers someof the great photographic hoaxes and waxesnostalgic about old Photoshop splash screenswhile Jan Kabili reports on Ben Willmore’s new Photoshop Insight Injections series, which starts off with an insightfularticle on using Camera Raw with SmartObjects.

DV Guru’s MikeBurgoyne reviews the new JVC GR-X5Camcorder and has some tips forpackaging your next DVD plus Ajit Anthony looks at newsoftware to help catalogue your video library.

Hackaday’s Fabienne Serriere shows how toget started with the csound software synth while EliotPhillips shows how to build a WiFi repeater and explainsthe easy lockpicking technique “bumping”.

TUAW’s Laurie A.Duncan goes over her Google Talk Mac wishlist while Scott McNulty conducts a battery survey withcoconutBattery andC.K. Sample, III wants to know whatpodcasts you’ve been listening to sincethe introduction of iTunes 4.9.

Joystiq’s Vladimir Cole teaches aboutthe short and long tails of Massively Multiplayer Gameswhile Ben Striegel wonders about prejudice in the gamesretail industry.

Engadget returns to itroots in 1985, but first Barb Dybwad wants to know whereIntel’s VIIV came from and Peter Rojas wants to know whatyou want to know about the HTC Universal.

Finally don’t forget to check out Download Squad’s review ofGoogle Talk.

Permalink 
read more:

Disclaimer: This post is about (gulp!) the Internet. If even the idea of putting up a real estate website for lease options leads makes you sleepless then wait for the next post on Hotlines etc that don’t require you to even have a computer. :-)

How to use the Internet to attract buyers for your Lease Options:

There is a pretty big section in most newspapers, week after week, called Rent To Own in the Real Estate Section. Some newspapers call the section Lease Option also.

You will also see ads targeting to prospects with bad credit saying something to the effect that if you have been turned down by the mortgage companies – call us to get the home of your dream.

As a side note I am not a big fan of Land Contracts in Michigan. The foreclosure process that is required to kick out a non-paying Land Contract buyer who bought your home and then defaulted is long and governed by the same laws in Michigan that govern a bank foreclosures.

Although in certain circumstances (property being vacant) you can accelerate the eviction and some astute investors who play in the Land Contract world have told me that they add a eviction clause in their custom made Land Contracts – I have yet to see one contract in reality.

So some of the companies in Michigan who advertise and focus especially on bad credit / home ownership themes might be selling a 12 / 18 month Land Contract deal which gets the seller cashed out at a later date via a refinance. So keep that in mind when you are reading these ads.

Rent To Own Ads are pretty much 100% Lease Option ads and it is a good idea to check them out in your local newspaper before you do anything so to get a feel of the marketing.

Very very few real estate investors use the Internet to market their lease options which if you choose to do so does gives you a pretty good advantage over your competition in your local city. This is how it works:

1. Run advertisements consistently (more on classified ads later) in your local newspaper. I said “local” and “consistently” – two very important and precious words to keep in mind. Also you want to run these ads EVEN when you have NO house at the moment to Lease Option (more on that strategy later also).

2. Direct your prospects to your website.

3. Your website has pictures (lots of them), virtual tour if you want to really blow them away, description of the house with the list of all the upgrades you have done, any promotion you are running (free appliances, gift gas card etc), lease details such as monthly payments, Option number and finally the most important thing of all….

4. An invitation to join your Lease Option Buyer List. So lets say 10 people come to your website as a result of an ad that you ran in your local newspaper.

Well technically you can only sell your 1 home to one out of 10 but the other 9 are still in the market to buy something. May be they don’t like “that” house but who is to say that will not like the second house that you put up next month.

Entice them and ask them to join your Hot Lease Option Upcoming Houses Notification List so they get priority notification even before the house hits the classified section.

Sort of a Pocket Listing Invitation if you want to use the REO slang.

Understand that this strategy is advanced and mostly not used by anybody. Everybody wants to wait till they have a house or worse when the house is done.

The term you need to remember in real estate is Build To Suit – if you doing this, week in, week out your market will tell you what kind of houses you should be looking for.

This is the beauty of having a website and use it for more to tell you what the market wants in your local Michigan city instead of thinking about your website as something to sell that ONE house that you have right now.

I know it might sound hard to believe at first try but really most investors get so tied up in “doing” that deal that they have burning a hole in their head that they forget to build a business.

Nothing personal – just a fact of life. All entrepreneurs go through it. I did too in the beginning.

5. These are some of the things that you should be asking at your site from your site visitors – name, email, number of bedrooms in the house they want to get, basement preference, brick or frame, garage preference, city preference, if you are operating in a city which is comparatively big – it would help to ask a more specific question for example if you see Detroit ads they will mention something like East Side or West Side preference.

Where can you advertise on the Internet to get leads?

1. Detroit Craig’s List; at http://detroit.craigslist.org Free

2. Google Base: http://base.google.com Free

3. Google / Yahoo will be a pain the rear to do and get some leads because you are competing against everybody and their mother selling a $20 book on how to do lease options. Very hard to do Pay Per Click ads and get some leads out of there – not to mention expensive.

4. The thing that I am watching closely is the evolution of Google Local ads that will let you target and run really local ads on Google, which will be really effective for our kind of business.

5. For Sale By Owner sites: cheap prices for the most basic packages. Owners.com is a good example. The whole idea is to get people come to your Lease Option website.

6. EBay – will cost money to run - $150 at least. Plus my feelings about EBay are that it is more suited toward building an Investor List than attracting local homebuyers.

Where can you advertise offline to get Lease Option leads?

I am very old fashioned when it comes to real estate leads. May be the reasons that the damm $26 ads have made me so much money. Real estate is a Local game.

Seriously doubt that a guy in L.A. is thinking about buying a 3 bedroom in Redford. But there are renters in Redford with kids in Redford schools and mom & dad working in Dearborn and Sterling Heights.

They are reading the Sunday’s Free Press and Redford Observer – may be a small percentage looks on the net – may be it is a big percentage; there is a no hard data available anywhere that can pinpoint where most of the people are looking for Lease Option deals.

But I would suggest to you that do both – with 1-2 Knockout punch:

Punch #1: Use the free resources – Google Base; Detroit Craig’s List initially till you close on some deals, put some new money in your business checking account and then think about spending some money on the Internet. Since both of the above are free (at least for the time of writing this)

Punch #2: Spend you money where it will get you the biggest Return on your Advertising Dollars – your local newspapers. In the above example – run small ads driving people to your website in BOTH newspapers – Detroit News and Redford Observer – I repeat run ads in not one but both newspapers.

Sometime I get emailed about the cost of running these ads – well I worry about what comes back to my bank account and not too much on what I have to spend.

As long as coming in number is bigger than going out number – all is good. You can charge the advertising on your business credit card and pay it once the house is Lease Optioned off.

Or you can close one deal and take $500 off right from the top to spend it on advertising on your next deal. The real big mind shift that most entrepreneurs never make is not to think of advertising / marketing as an expense but as investment to build their business.

There are 2 big things in my business I spend money like it is going out of style – my education and my advertising. As long as I feed these two dragons, all is good in Planet Ijlal.

Website Domain Name Tips:

Spend some time thinking of a good and short domain name for your website. Rule of thumb is that keep it within 21 characters with the dot COM thing so it fit in one line.

Newspapers classified sections have a notorious tendency to break down the name in 2 lines if it is long and put a hyphen in the middle. I don’t have to tell you that that becomes a different name.

I had this experience personally one time when my ForeclosureTour.com ad became Foreclosure-Tour.com in two lines. Suffice to say that I did not get any leads that week.

So keep it within 20-21 characters and you will be in the limit. Also you don’t have to use www moniker anymore. I don’t use it anymore. www.MarkIjlal.com or MarkIjlal.com work the same way.

Also I hate long winded domain names – abcpropertyinvestmentsgroup.com is a great tribute to your LLC’s name but come on…. One of my coaching group member Lou Provanzano got a cool name recently for his Detroit deal – www.DetroitOnTheMove.com which gets full marks for originality and sounding good when you say it, print it and leave it on your voice mail.

And yes I am guilty of having long names in the past too – some of them are so crappy that I am actually embarrassed to share them here.

But the point is you want to have a good name; should spend some time on it, make a list of 10-20 names; ask your significant other, if you are in my coaching group, email me the names before you blow the insignificant amount of money needed to reserve them via Godaddy.com. Get a second opinion. This is how the world will see and your business. It is worth spending some time on.

How to get your Lease Option Website Designed:

This is the part where most will hesitate because they are still thinking big dollars when it comes to websites. In 2006, websites are so cheap that there is no excuse left for not to have one.

Where can you get a decent site made?

1. Do you have kids? Do you have neighbors who have kids? Do you have nieces, nephews, and little cousins? Know anybody who goes to a high school??? Every High School in America has a clique of geeks who can design a better-looking site than most web design firms out there.

I have personally hired 16 year olds – one time even flew one from Denver, CO to Michigan to work for two weeks on a business that I used to have. I had one 18 year old actually move to metro Detroit from U.P. to work on a project.

These kids were smarter, harder working and had a better work ethic than most grown ups I have worked with in the last 10 years. They get it. And they love doing this stuff and putting it for the world to see it.

I met an 18-year-old two years ago who was designing websites for Detroit Hip Hop acts – his sites could go heads up with a $50,000 site – he was doing this for $10 per hour.

Ask anybody who is going to high school and is between 14-18 in your life. They know a geek who can whip up a world class website for you in 7 days for probably pennies.

2. You can always go the outsourcing route and use a website a www.elance.com or www.rentacoder.com which will let you post up for free what you are looking for; bunch of companies (most of them in India / China and Eastern Europe) will put up competitive bids. They all have reviews on the previous work they have done; read them and give one the site to do.

If you are totally lazy and don’t want to do anything at all – then spend couple of hours trolling Google and Yahoo and find a website on lease options that you like and then tell whomever is doing your site to make your site look like them.

And for crying out aloud don’t copy blatantly but use it for inspiration and ideas. Most people like me use a copyright protection service that trolls the web looking for lift offs.

When we find somebody cutting and pasting our stuff – we get him or her shut down. I did that to bunch of bogs already that were just copying and pasting my content on their sites.

Next Part 5: How to figure out your Cashflow Payments, Exit Strategies that nobody wants to hear about but they sure do work, the absentee owner thing.