Realbird, the Bay Area-based MLS search provider, launched a real estate Wiki about the same time that Zillow made its big December 6th announcement, which also included a Wiki.
Industry wikis have yet to take off, at least in real estate, but now that Inman has acquired Realbird’s Wiki, that might change. Real estate professionals have been reluctant to contribute content to Zillow’s wiki for at least two reasons:
- They remain eternally suspicious of Zillow’s intentions and are skeptical of making a contribution to a site which they believe will turn on them.
- There’s currently no way of getting attribution for contributing. (”What do we Realtors want? Linkbacks! When do want it? Now!”) We may be happy to add to the body of knowledge out there, but we want some credit for it. The crude and simple way around this is to put a link back to our own site within our post, but the efficient Zillow cops tend to pick that up pretty quickly. (Drew, are you reading this?
)
Inman’s foray into the Wiki space may overcome the first, and for the time being the Inman Wiki does allow for author attribution — see, for instance, the post on my broker, Alain Pinel Realtors, which clearly marks yours truly as the author. (Note to self: need to update this entry to reflect the fact that the VP of Marketing has just left. Done.)
From a consumer perspective, the big problem with an industry wiki is neutrality, an illustration of which is another entry on Alain Pinel Realtors. This one is pure marketing bumph, lifted word-for-word from our corporate-speak-ridden 1.0-era brochure-ware web site. Given the article’s attribution of Inman itself, I have to assume this article was simply copied in order to seed the wiki.
Tags: Inman News, Real estate, Realbird, Zillow
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3 responses so far ↓
1 Drew M from Zillow // Feb 2, 2007 at 9:24 am
Kevin-
Yup - of course I’m reading
However, David G is going to respond to this one.
2 David G from Zillow.com // Feb 2, 2007 at 9:55 am
Hi Kevin, it’s David from Zillow.
I agree that neutrality is a challenge for wiki’s in real estate but I think that it is an important goal and that it’s attainable. I disagree that a wiki needs a huge following in terms of authorship to succeed — wikipedia is authored by a relatively tiny number of regular contributors — given their experience, it would take far less than 0.1% of active Realtors to support and build a very valuable wiki for the real estate industry.
I also personally disagree that heavy attribution is essential to a wiki’s success — wikipedia has proven that it isn’t. If anything, too much attribution will stifle wiki contribution if articles are seen to “belong” to particular authors. That said, Zillow’s real estate wiki does in fact attribute the most recent edit to its author (at the top of each article) — and we attribute every historic revision to its author in the article’s history.
Thanks for recognizing the excellent work Drew and team are doing to moderate the wiki — it’s not a forum for self-promotion and we’re working hard to set the tone by removing spam content. Soon enough, our spammers will get the message.
3 Bill Compton // Jun 4, 2007 at 2:34 pm
Hi Jim. Photos i received. Thanks
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