Power Tools on Technology

One of the millions of people Time magazine is referring to in its 2006 Person of the Year report is Krista Miller, an agent with Windermere Bay Area Real Estate in Berkeley, CA. Using the video recording feature on her digital camera, Miller recently made a video tour of a client's home and posted it on YouTube for free, where it could be viewed by anyone in the world. The listing recently sold to someone who first saw the house on YouTube.

Although she isn't the first real estate professional to use YouTube and similar websites in their marketing efforts, Miller's experience shows that a quick video posted on a free website can bring excellent results. "Generation X and Y are looking at YouTube,'' she said in the San Jose Mercury News. "Not every listing service is going to cater to that particular population.'' NAR's chief technology officer, Mark Lesswing, told the paper that Miller's example is typical of anyone trying to use new technology in their business. "You need to set yourself apart from what others are doing,'' he said. "It means packaging what they have into what consumers want on the Internet.''

Posted on December 18 at 02:53 PM | Permanent Link | Add a Comment (0)

Congratulations! All of that hard work and sacrifice paid off. Time magazine has announced that you are its Person of the Year.

Okay, maybe not you specifically, but "you" as in anyone who creates content and posts it on the Internet. Instead of focusing on the violence and skirmishes that made so many headlines this year, Time decided to pay homage to the growing trends of individual contribution and cooperation that are making many of today's most popular websites so successful: "It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes."

YouTube, Wikipedia, blogs, podcasts, and other aspects of Web 2.0 are part of "a massive social experiment," TIME says. Whether or not the experiment succeeds, it is an opportunity to connect with others and exchange ideas via technology. "It's a chance for people to look at a computer screen and really, genuinely wonder who's out there looking back at them," Time says in the Person of the Year feature.

Posted on December 18 at 10:43 AM | Permanent Link | Add a Comment (0)