Not so long ago I have made a decision to discontinue using Discus Comments Management on my other blogs. My concerns were a little silly at the time. I love what Disqus have done so far and certainly some of the features they offer convinced me to keep them on few of my other blogs including Go Beyond MLS. In fact I have encouraged other real estate bloggers to give this service a try.

Besides my growing concerns with the way Disqus is handling spam. Evidently they think one comment box is not enough for the visitors to my blog:

Evidently it is some sort of glitch in their system. But since we are on the topic here are two other concerns of mine:

• Import/Export Feature needs serious upgrade. If you decide for whatever reason to discontinue to use Disqus and export the comments from their system and then import them to your blog, it will simply create individual blog posts- hundreds or even thousands of them if your blog is popular. It would be nice idea to develop a plugin that would enter every comment into your own database, thus eliminating the need of import/export feature.
• Spam. While I have no complains of spam slipping to my blog. I do see some legitimate comments being flagged as spam. I hate “collective intelligence” approach as far as spam is concerned. I am not sure a frame work of Spam Karma would help, but it would be a good idea to offer each individual blogger control over the spam moderation.

I have been using the Digg Style Pagination plugin on several of my other blogs. Just two days ago I have finally installed it on this blog. If you scroll to the bottom of the home page (or any of the archive pages) you will notice that default WordPress pagination was replaced with the new (and I might say really slick looking) pagination:

Of course if you follow advise of SEO experts and “nofollow” the duplicate content, the use of Digg Style Pagination Plugin has absolutely no effect on your blog besides being a good looking widget and letting your readers know your blog has been around for a while. It looks that with three posts per page, this plugin shows 54 pages- starting from home page.

This plugin also creates pagination for category and tag pages. It is also worth mentioning that plugin is compatible with the version 2.6 of WordPress.

Update: Since writing this post it appears StumbleUpon will be lifting the 200 friends limit after all. It is not yet in effect, but it will probably be possible to add more than 200 friends in the days to come. I still think however it is a good idea to clean up your list once in a while.

Yes I know. The question does not sound like a nice one, but bare with me and you may discover that it is indeed a valid question.

There is one thing I used to hate about StumbleUpon- that I was limited to adding only 200 friends in my account. Today I was proven wrong or at least partially wrong.

In the last few months I have came across many great Stumblers and wanted to follow them. However I was not able to do so due to above described limitation. So I decided to do a major clean up of my contact list on StumbleUpon. I have set forth following criteria for this clean up:

1. I planned to remove contacts from my list if they were last seen on StumbleUpon before January 1, 2008. I think seven months of inactivity was plenty to let me know that a particular stumbler lost his or her interest in the community.
2. I intended to remove any one who did not befriended me back. Only leaving those who were unable to befriend me due to the above limitation.
3. Finally I was planing to remove every one with whom I hand no more than 3 interests in common.

Fortunately I did not have to follow through on #2 and #3. As soon as I began removing those who fell into my #1 criteria, I discovered that many of them had their account suspended on StumbleUpon. I also noticed that every one of those who were suspended had a default StumbleUpon avatar (image to the right) associated with their account. That of course made my job so much easier.

The end result was that although I am still limited to have only 200 friends on StumbleUpon, there is some room for new friends. I also plan to reserve these few spots for real estate bloggers. If you are one of them, feel free to add me to your friends: My StumbleUpon Profile. If you already have 200 friends in your profile, please leave the link in the comments so I can add you to my contacts anyway. Hopefully one day you will do the similar clean up and will find some room for me.

photo credit: psdOver the period of last few months I was a recipient of incredible support and generosity for the bloggers around the world and real estate bloggers in particular. While I have no words to describe my gratitude, there was one question constantly on my mind: “What can I do to show my gratitude to all these wonderful people?”

I am a firm believer in saying “what does around, comes around”. In other words I should not be expecting other people to be supportive and generous to me, if I am not supportive and generous to other people. However at the end of the day, no matter how much I give it always seems that I receive back hundredfolds. And so is true about last few months.

As a token of my gratitude to many bloggers and real estate professionals, I am working on few projects that hopefully will benefit you in some way.

Blogroll
While I am not in favor of site wide blogrolls, I have decided to implement on on my blog. The exception of course is that it is not a side wide but a dedicated page which will show the blogs on my blogroll. With the help of the Live Blogroll plugin, I have added a little twist to my blog roll. If you navigate to the blogroll page and hover with your mouse over the links a need ajax pop-up will appear with the latest articles from your blog. This blogroll is the work in progress, so if you did not see your blog there yet it will probably appear in next few days. I will also look into the way to paginate that page so it can redistribute the “link juice” to the bookmarks there in equal measure. I will also try to play around with the plugin and instead of serving the “latest post” through the ajax widget I will attempt to embed them in the page itself. I think that would add more value to the blogroll itself besides it being just collection of links.

Free Consulting: Blogging and Internet Marketing.
As many of your may gather I know a thing or two about blogging and internet marketing. If you do not have a blog yet, I encourage you to start one immediately. If you have one already, feel free to ask my advise on how you can improve your blog performance.

Free Translating And Interpreting.
If you ever decide to market your real estate business in other languages, I will be happy to help you out. While I do not speak Spanish, I can translate and interpret for you in Ukrainian, Russian, Polish and Italian. Due to my schedule I will be offering this only to the blog owners listed in my blogroll, again the Blogroll is a word in progress and I am anticipating to have more than 100 blogs on the list. So please stop again in the future.

If you have any questions about the above offers feel free to contact me.

Trying to bring myself up to speed with things around real estate blogosphere I have came across across the RSSPieces announcement that Mary McNight, the founder and (now former) Chief Marketing Officer of RSSPieces “is no longer part of the day to day operations of RSS Pieces”.

During last week I have e-mailed Mary once or twice and never received a reply. Very unusual of her, since in the past Mary would respond to my e-mails rather promptly- at times within minutes.

On her Active Rain blog Mary wrote briefly that her relationship with RSSPieces went south. Evidently many of the Mary’s social medial accounts where hijacked, but she is on they way to recover them.

So will the pieces at RSSPieces stick together now that Mary is gone? From the comments on RSSPieces appears that they might already be falling apart.

I personally never was Mary’s client and our paths would not have crossed if I was not interested in Internet Marketing and Blogging. Needless to say Mary has my respect and support. Mary had build a strong and respectable profile for RSSPieces. She is well known and respected in various circles of this wonderful new media we call blogging. It is hard to know what really happened and what Mary is planing for the future. Real Estate Radio USA is interviewing Mary today, so I am looking forward to that interview.

I am certain though that Mary will have no problem to be successful no matter which direction she decides to take. RSSPieces on the other hand will have to struggle and really step up a bit, especially now that many of the clients are disappointed and confused.