I’m normally too busy to bother paying much attention to the growing legion of sploggers out there.  If a post or two of mine gets “borrowed” (with or without a linkback) I normally let it slide, but I definitely start complaining if it becomes habitual.  Most sploggers ride on a modest wave of Google Adwords-funded revenue for a few weeks, get shut down, and then move on.  Sometimes a new re.net blogger springs up and decides it’s easier to “borrow” than to write content, but after a few polite email exchanges and explanations, they tend to shape up.

Occasionally, however, a pretty egregious case of content-borrowing comes across the transom.  Imagine my surprise when this latest splog incarnation turned out to be affiliated with Brokers USA — whom I shall not grace with a linkback — which appears to be a respectable, buttoned-up, long-standing San Francisco real estate firm specializing in hospitality properties.

The site’s blog has 2 loooong content pages — which translated into roughly 180 pages when I saved them in a PDF.  A few minutes of perusing these pages found content from

• My blog
• Redfin’s Bay Area blog
• Curbed.com
• SocketSite
  and, perhaps most creatively
• Trulia Voices

The latter included a question on HUD ownership, graciously answered by Kristal Kraft and a few others.

In all fairness to the site’s “author” Gregory Garver, he responded fairly quickly to my email and fax request to take down my content.  His response, however, indicates that he may not yet understand the basic decorum around blogging.  Perhaps UCSB, his apparent alma mater, had no rules against plagiarism?

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Trulia Voices, launched 10 weeks ago, is an online real estate Q&A forum, adding qualitative information (”Where are the good restaurants in this neighborhood? Why are prices higher on the other side of Main Street?) to Trulia’s robust quantitative offering (”What are median home prices in Akron? How many homes are for sale in Menlo Park?”)

Trulia just announced some fairly impressive numbers for the product. On average, each question gets answered in 20 minutes and receives 3.2 answers. As of 11:56pm on July 31st, there were just about 4000 (3897 to be exact) questions on the site.

While many of the agent participants on the site are, as you would expect, also active bloggers, there is a growing contingent of agents who seem to be using Voices as a platform to begin learning about online real estate interaction.

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Full disclosure: Friend and colleague Pat Kitano of Transparentre.com and I have established a consulting company, and one of our projects has been helping Trulia with its Voices product.

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