Digg This
John Lockwood over at ParticleWave has created a nifty little Digg-like site for real estate.
Houssee.com’s mission is, “to be a promotional tool for Realtors®, mortgage brokers, and others in the real estate blogging community, while putting systems and strong moderation in place to keep out the spam.”
How the Gears Turn
Running on the Pligg platform, users can submit articles from their own (or other) sites. Users will “vote” articles onto the “Published News” page for all to see.
It’s like Digg for real estate.
Uh, Wait…
Someone out there is probably saying, “Isn’t this just like RealEstateVoices.com?”
Yes and no. Have you been to RealEstateVoices lately? It’s been over-run by spam. A few die-hard real estate users seem to be battling it out with the spammers. It’s a gallant effort I’m sure, but the site appears to be hopelessly lost to the likes of those hawking wares regarding anything from French lessons to discount climbing gear to male and female “enhancement” products. And seriously, can a story submitted 662 days ago really be considered “breaking news”?
I registered and submitted a few articles to Houssee. Registering is painless and submitting articles is intuitive. Users can “vote up” articles, and add their thoughts via a comment feature. Unlike Digg, there doesn’t seem to be a way to “vote down” something — probably a good thing as it prevents the often childlike behavior that can be found on sites with “thumbs down” functionality. If you don’t like something, simply don’t vote for it.
If Houssee takes off, managing a site like this could turn into a full-time job, and John has many irons in the fire. But he’s a pretty driven guy, so I suspect that won’t be an issue.
What You Should Do
So take a look. Submit a few of your blog posts or other posts/news items you find of interest. Vote for what you like and think others may find interesting. John promises some linky goodness for top contributers to get this thing kick started, though hopefully that’s not your motivating factor for participating.
Personally, my feed reader has grown like Barry Bonds on steroids and has at times become difficult to wade through. Separating the good from the not-so-swift is tedious and I often just nuke the whole thing and start fresh — all the while wondering what gems I’ve missed out on. If folks can use this site to submit quality articles, it could become a nice one-stop shop for real estate reading — sort of like an on-going Carnival of Real Estate.
I think it should be interesting to watch. Your thoughts would be?
