Finally, a Techmeme for Real Estate. TheClozing.com

May 11, 2009
By: Drew Meyers
Author's Website: http://www.zillow.com

theclozing

It’s no secret that I’ve been wanting a “Techmeme for Real Estate” for over a year now. I hoped 2009 would be the year — and, last week, my wish was granted! The idea became a reality when TheClozing was launched by Anthony Barba & Joseph Ferrara. First, what is it?

TheClozing is a new real estate and business news aggregator. We gather and organize real estate and business news from major U.S. newspapers, magazines and publications with related articles from Social Media. All links are to the original sources. News is updated hourly to provide continuously fresh content.

The site is currently sponsored by 1000watt consulting and Better Homes and Gardens. I just spent a few minutes and have a couple observations about their results:

This Carnival of Real feedback post is listed as the number 1 story right now, probably due to the fact that we just posted this week’s CoRE on Zillow Blog (it links back to the feedback post). This is not the most popular story in the RE.net right now — though, having managed the CoRE for the past few years, I wish it was.
The number two story is this post on Agent Genius, which probably should be the number 1 story right now (321 comments).
Number 3? How To Market Yourself — For Free — On Zillow (Video Tutorial). Again, I like this result because I work for Zillow, but it probably should not be number 3 on the list since I haven’t seen any other blogs link to it as of yet. My hunch is that there is some sort of authority scale (as there should be) and Zillow Blog ranks as one of the higher authority real estate blogs in the list.

There’s still some work to do with the algorithm, but no website is perfect out of the gate. I’m confident Joe and Anthony will be working to improve the quality of the algorithm for determining what the most popular current stories are. Regardless, congratulations for getting this up and running!

Techmeme is HUGELY popular for its ability to surface the most popular conversations within the tech industry. We’ll see if TheClozing can turn into the same type of resource for the real estate community over time. What do you think – is this compelling enough to ditch your feed reader? Or have you already done that in favor of Twitter (something that is slowly happening for me)?

[via Josh at Bigger Pockets]

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Patrick Healy

I have already done this with the people I have put in specific groups in Tweetdeck however I am still going to go to this site since it potentially can get rid of my "Real Estate" group. Also, Twitter doesn't give me any indication of the quality of the post. I generally will click on it if it's posted by a smart person (IMO) or if I see it a few times. This will eliminate the need for me to think about this (potentially). Looking forward to watching this thing unfold and mature.

-PH

Joseph Ferrara

You are absolutely right Drew. The Agent Genius post should be number 1 (not 2) but it has remained on the Clozing despite being published last week (wait, it's now #1). Still, we must try to get the top stories to rise to the top. And we also face the challenge of finding the best sources for RE news. I am not the tech brain behind the curtain but it appears that ZillowBlog has achieved a level of higher authority in the algorithm, a credit to you folks and those great blog post writers (can I borrow a couple of them?)
We'll keep at it and hope we can train those darn computers. Thank the tech gods for the beta tag.
Thanks, Drew for your coverage.
PS Wasn't it at an Inman Beer w/Bloggers that we talked about this?

Drew Meyers

Yup, Inman Beer w/ Bloggers sounds about right. I think the Zillow Blog authority should stay right where it is -- and, no, you can can't have any of our talented writers :)

Tony Sena

Wow, what an under taking! Congrats on the launch!

My initial question is how do they determine what is news and what isn't? It's obvious they can't pull over every article that is published so I would be interested in knowing how the algorithm determines what is and isn't news.

Also, what if a real estate blog, let's say isn't real popular posts breaking news about their local real estate market and a more well known real estate blog picks it up and publishes their own article. Will the original source be picked up or the more authority site?

real estate in panama

I believe that this site may also help others in finding a loan with the lowest possible interest rate. The site also lists the top 10 lenders for real estate loans as well as answering questions about the new $8,000 credit for first time home buyers.

Regards,
Henry Miller,
Real estate in Panama.

real estate in panama

I’m a big fan of Techmeme. I like the site and I would probably read it, but it needs an RSS feed so I can add it to iGoogle. This is a pretty interesting idea and might work to some level. There is so much info out there these days that I still think people are comfortable getting their info from different sources. If they can find out a way to organize this, I think it works. My first look is simply an impression of Good Idea but a little confusing on combining it all and making news stories relevant to each other.

Regards,
Henry Miller,
Real estate in Panama.

Charles Richey

Congratulations. Perhaps Drew will be kind enough to share a few secrets with you Joe. I think it will work out because after awhile you end up with too many things to look at and you never get any "work" done. I will probably go the route that Patrick is and get rid of a few items.

Finally, a Techmeme for Real Estate. TheClozing.com

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