ActiveRain Takes Off the Training Wheels

ActiveRain, the “social network” for real estate professionals, has announced they are close to rolling out “Outside Blogs”.

Outside Blogs takes the ActiveRain blogging platform outside the confines of the ActiveRain network, allowing the 60,000+ members of the network to have a blog outside of the ActiveRain network.

Many in the RE.net see AR as a “training ground” for bloggers. Lots of folks cut their teeth blogging on ActiveRain — which provides a simple to use platform and built in readership. Typically however, many AR bloggers will then venture off and start their own blog on their own domain.

With this announcement, AR may have found a way to keep Rainers in the fold. They can venture off but still stay connected to the AR network. It appears that AR will be charging for the “Outside Blog”, but the amount has not been released.

As with many AR blog posts, the “sneak peek” post has generated a flurry of “I love it! Can’t Wait!” comments. Details as to capability are still fuzzy – the release is in very limited beta.

What they have said:

• You will be able to host your blog on your own domain. For example, you can have your posts feed to bobisgreat.com if you own that domain.
• You will be able to customize the look and feel of your blog.
• It’s easy to set up your outside blog. You can be up and running in less than 15 minutes.
• You will be able to build your posts in ActiveRain. You won’t have to learn a new platform.
• You will be able to decide where you want your posts to publish. Do you just want your outside blog to be about local content pertinent to your local market? You will be able to decide which posts go where. Send your local market reports to your outside blog. Send your real estate industry related posts to ActiveRain. The choice is yours.
• You will be able to benefit from the SEO knowledge and power of ActiveRain.
• You will be able to brand your own blog while at the same time staying connected with the ActiveRain community. Your comments will be syndicated between your ActiveRain blog and your outside blog.

In looking at some of the beta blogs, it appears that in addition to comment “syndication”, AR tags are also syndicated. Other than custom headers, I don’t see a whole lot of differences between the few beta sites I’ve seen.

I’ve attempted to try to ping back some of these blogs with no success. Not having ping/track back capability on “inside” blogs has been a large factor in keeping many AR blogs isolated from the “outside” world. I’ve asked if the outside platform will have ping back capability and have not received an answer.

I can subscribe to the feed of an outside blog hosted on an AR sub-domain via RSS, however when I click though my feed reader to a post, I get an error that the server *.activerain.com” can not be found. When I attempted to subscribe to an outside blog on its own domain name, I was unsuccessful — nothing came up in the reader.

Again, it is early in beta, so these problems will likely be ironed out.

Given AR’s built in base of users, and the fact that “Outside Blogs” give these users the familiar AR interface and ease of use, I suspect we’ll see many people taking advantage of this. While I hope this doesn’t mean the blogiverse will be flooded with posts sporting dozens of “Great post!” comments, I don’t see how that will be avoided with the proposed comment syndication.

As I wrote this post, I found myself quickly agreeing with Joel Burslem — the name “Outside Blogs” really needs re-thinking.

Time will tell how successful this will be. Pricing will be critical. Rainers are used to everything being free — how much they are willing to pay to join the outside blogiverse remains to be seen.