Union Street MediaReal Estate and Ecommerce Web Design

I heard via an Inman Community posting that the popular classifieds-style site Craigslist has announced its intention to limit the use of HTML. An exceptionally heated forum resulted (warning, much of the language used in the posts lacks sophistication and subtlety).

I, personally, don’t have a problem with HTML in Craigslist, but some folks clearly do.

Wading through those forum posts yields some insight into the thinking of Craigslist’s social marketplace. I’ve filtered through a few, provided here to be used as a direction of Voice of the Customer research for anyone using Craigslist for marketing (I have added the emphasis and corrected spelling). Notice in particular which needs are being met or not met by HTML in Craigslist.

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The Pew Internet & American Life Project did a study earlier this year about usage of online video. The total percentage of people surveyed who had ever interacted with a video-sharing site was 48%. But even more intriguing is this:

15% of respondents said they had used a video-sharing site “yesterday” — the day before they were contacted for our survey. A year ago, 8% had visited such a site “yesterday.”

This little tidbit is a measure of recency, how often people come into contact with video online. So about twice as many people are making significant use of online video content than the previous year. Recency is a good thing to watch because it eliminates the individuals who tried it out and then never used it again. Recency shows us what is actually being used.

The report includes a lot of demographic data about video users as well. You can see it at  “Online Video Audience Surges.”

Another map post.  Today it’s foreclosures, via HotPads.com.

New York Fed Mortgage Maps via a tip from Matt Carter. The server is crushed at the time I write this so you’ll have to play with it yourself. See also the previous post on Economic Maps of the US.

Glen Roberts Jr. over at Inman News reports on a paper written by Brian Larson, a Minneapolis lawyer, about the sorts of risks multiple listing services are taking by signing contracts with Zillow et al.

The main points seem to be:

• Signing anything without negotiating is bad form
• Even though the listings are free, there are costs associated with setting up a data feed (don’t I know it)
• All legal risks associated with publishing at the sites tends to default to the MLS
• The question of when will a listing be removed is murky and often undefined, leading to a listing remaining on a site long after it becomes inactive
• Some contracts grant the sites “almost complete control” of the data
• Potential brand risks
• Promises such as providing data that is “free from defects” is boilerplate in many of the contracts, something that the MLS can’t guarantee.

I would have liked to see a little more meat in this but I haven’t been able to locate the original paper.

This little post is for the interactive economic map lovers out there.

Ann Arbor Real Estate Talk has tipped us off to USAToday’s “How’s the economy in your hometown.”

Combine that with the Phoenix Real Estate Guy’s tip to the WSJ’s “Housing Markets: A Vacant Look” and there’s definitely some overlap.

For example in the USAToday map, markets are listed alphabetically over on the right as you roll over by state. Meaning you had best paid attention in 4th and 5th grade when you were learning the important markets of the US to get any contextual information from the map.

WSJ, on the other hand, really only surveys a few counties, but you can see the data in context and the markets grouped together. California is a particularly interesting puzzle.

Do you see anything in these maps?