Fizber announced today introduction of API (Application Programing Interface). Very smart use by Fizber I must add. If marketed properly this can explode in new widgets, just like the one you see to the right.

It would be interesting to see this development. At this early stage Fizber APIs will allow web masters to pull in the data about climate, schools, unemployment some other general neighborhood information.

Julia Foster, Fizber.com VP of marketing, in a low key press release was quoted say: “This new API access is going to be a useful tool for every agent and site that wants to offer something special in their real estate portfolio.”

I personally think many web masters should pay attention to this development. It also should be as warning sign to many of the local MLSs. Instead of fighting real estate agents over stupid trademark use, why don’t you guys pay attention and develop the API for your own members.

It has been few months since this website was “quantified” on qunatcast.com. There are some interesting and surprising statistics about this blog. But first things first. What is Quantcast what does it mean to be quantified?

Quancast is an internet rating service. In other words they provide data about traffic to the websites. Currently they have over rated over 20 millions websites. They get their data? It’s done by estimates (please do not ask me how they do it) or by direct measurements. When you visit the Quantcast.com you will notice that the good number of websites are “quantified”. Those are the websites that are being measured directly. And yes I recommend you to quantify your site. It’s very simple to register, and all you need to do to quantify your website is to place a peace of code into the template of your website or blog, similar of what you do with the code from Google Analytics.

Since this blog is hardly known by any one, it took about two months for Quantcast to report demographic data of the visors to this website. This demographic data about visitors to this website was the main reason I ever registered with Qunatcast.

Here are just few snapshots.

Gender and Age Of Go Beyond MLS Visitors
I thought that more women are visiting my blog. The real estate industry is dominated by women. Even when I was active in the real estate, out of 15 agents in our office there were only 5 men. Since real estate agents is my target audience I naturally thought that most of my visitors are women.

The age of the visitors completely surprised me. I belong in the 25-34 age group so I though my visitors would be of the same age. I turns out my site is more popular among 55-64 age group. This of course is very humbling to know that more experienced people find my blog interesting enough to visit.

Household Income and Ethnicity of Go Beyond MLS Visitors

I had really no expectation about these statistics. Still don’t know if this knowledge will have any real effect on how I develop this blog. But there you go:

Education and Children of Go Beyond MLS Visitors

Again, had no expectations whatsoever about these statistics. I guess they can be useful as far as advertising is concerned. But since the demand for advertising on my website is minimal, I will just look at it and say: “Hmm, interesting”.

So why would you want to know this sort of data about you website? I think above data can be extremely useful if you are trying to target a specific audience.

Quantcast provides some great reports on geographic location of your visitors. You can see where do your visitors come from by country, state and city. This of course can very useful for the real estate websites.

How reliable is Quancast data? I would say that the data on “qualified” websites, or directly measured websites, is right on target. But why should you believe me, try it for yourself.

You can see the entire report for my website here. If you care to share similar statistics about your blog or website, feel tree to leave a link the the comments.

I have decided to play around with Google Custom Search. Now you can find pages and documents on this domain using the big “G”. Since this website is powered by WordPress, many who read this post will wonder why? Do I trust Google more? The answer to this question is yeas and no. Mos of the WordPress themes today include a “search box”. This default search in WordPress will serve your visitors the most up to date results, since there maybe some latest posts on our website that Google has not yet discovered. So why on earth would some one consider using Google?

There few reasons to consider.

It may help you to avoid duplicate content. Unfortunately some of the WordPress themes are written poorly. Some times it can happen that what suppose to a “search” results can be indexed in the search engines. In fact, there is no way for a search engine to tell a regular page apart from a page produced by your on site “search function”. I am not sure if this is a common problem but it does happen.

If you have several similar websites, you can tell Google Custom Search to serve results from the all of your websites. You can even include websites that do not belong to you, but you think that your visitors would benefit from the results.

You can refine the results so your visitors after performing a search will be served with the most relevant search results.

I also think that the “native” search option of WordPress is underutilized. When you place the Google Custom Search code on your website, the text box has Google’s logo in it. Don’t forget that word google had become a verb, it is associated with search. Don’t tell me you have never said: “Let me Google this or that out”!

Many of the visitors to your website will recognize Google’s loge before recognizing anything else on your website.

I personally have chosen to serve the search results via an AJAX Search API interface, I just thought it looked really sharp. So go ahead try my new search box and let me know what do you think.

Easy Soft, has announced today the update of their popular software package Easy HUD. According to a press release the software is used by more than 10,000 attorneys nationwide. Dr. Rick Kabra, the CEO of Easy soft was quoted saying the following:

While preparing HUD forms was simple, balancing the closing, preparing disbursement checks and bookkeeping for trust accounts was always tedious and time consuming for law firms, especially smaller firms who do not have dedicated staff for each task. We are pleased to have eliminated all these processes with this new release. We serve more than 15,000 law firms and are known for our low cost, easy-to-use, innovative and time-saving programs that help law offices achieve automation.

According to the same press release the latest version of the software can:

• automatically generate a Lender Statement listing each pre-disbursed/deducted item;
• automatically generate escrow checks and a ledger statement listing all deposits/disbursements without any additional data entry (all required information is automatically extracted from 2 pages of HUD-1 or 1 page of HUD-1A);
• automatically complete trust bookkeeping with Easy Trust program without any manual transaction entry;
• place title order to any participating title agency and automatically save entered information as a partially completed purchase or refinance document;
• monitor title status at multiple title agencies within Easy HUD;
• save all settlement forms in PDF/Word format and email right within the program;
• identify state charges for the more than 40 jurisdictions that are now built into the program; and
• access the latest file management features so an entire team can work together efficiently and locate documents quickly.

Easy Soft is a North Brunswick, NJ based company and has been developing legal software for the last two decades.