I am honored that this blog has had the good fortune to be nominated as a candidate for best Baltimore blog by Zillow.com,  one of the top real estate sites in the nation.  The voting to choose the best goes through 3:00 Eastern Daylight time August 11, 2010. You can vote once a day.

Please Vote For Me!

It will only take a moment to vote.  Click the banner to vote for me as the best real estate blog from Baltimore.  Once you are on the Zillow site a window will open to vote.

Click the Banner above

Thanks for your votes!!!

Ned

I recently wrote about Blog Rush in my post A Cool New Tool a a blog promotion service. I just read on the Success With Languages blog that Blog Rush is shutting down immediately. Sure enough the widget on my sidebar is gone.  I was just starting to like it. I had started to get some traffic from it and I actually clicked on a lot of the links myself because it feeds a lot of interesting sounding posts.

John Reese of Blog Rush writes about it on his Income.com blog

Change is inevitable, best wishes to the people at Blog Rush.

Ned

I found a cool new tool for both readers of my blog and other bloggers.  Actually it’s not all that new, but I haven’t seen it that much so I am going to test it out.  Scroll down and you will see a new feature on the right side of my blog. It’s a new “widget’ called Blog Rush. Each time you visit you will see 5 new links to posts from real estate blogs.  These are all real estate blogs and none of them are paid posts so there is a high likelihood that you will find value in these links.

My links get shown on other blogs in return for showing their links on my blog. The more my “widget’ get seen and the more clicks it gets, the more my links get shown on other sites.  It’s a win win. Readers find new sites of interest and bloggers get more traffic.

Click my widget, Get more traffic

If you are a blog owner this tool can drive traffic to your blog. Most importantly it is relevant traffic because they only send you traffic for the category you pick. It is sort of like Google AdSense but it is all blog posts, no paid ads. Best of all it’s free! You don’t get paid for the ads like AdSense but you don’t pay for the traffic either.

If you like the idea do me a favor, sign up through me. I’ll get a few extra links that way. Click the Blog Rush button on the bottom of the widget. It will take you to there site with full info. If you have a question leave a comment.

Happy investing and happy blogging,

Ned

Have you heard of ePerks? They are one of the many new alternatives to the traditional multiple listing services run by Realtors. There are many great new alternatives to consumers to find real estate on the Net. Some of them have much more powerful tools for free than I pay high dollars to get as an agent.

EPerks apparently isn’t one of them. They have a bad reputation spread over the net.  One blogger Vlad Zablotskyy reviewed them on his Go Beyond MLS website. He had numerous agents comment on his post about their experiences with ePerks.  EPerks didn’t like this and have sued Vlad. Their claim – that Mr Zablotskyy made up the negative comments about their company. It’s an absurd claim as there were hundreds of comments both negative and positive.  Many of the positive ones and ones critical of Vlad came from IP addresses apparently related to ePerks.

This is truly a case of bullying. In fact BrokerScience.com posted a recording of Ben Behrouzi the owner of ePerks threatening an employee of a former company. He said “My new goal in life is going to become to ruin your name across this entire East Bay” That sounds like a bully to me. 

It would appear from IP addresses that someone from ePerks that put a false post on Answers.com that Vlad was a child molester. It is scary to think that simply posting an honest opinion on a little known website could have your good reputation trashed in a way that would be very hard to recover from. Sounds more like e-Jerks to me.

Of course, I don’t know if the allegations against ePerks are true, they may not be. I do know that how they have handled this is a public relations nightmare. I never saw any of the negative press against them until they started bullying Vlad. I don’t think much of them now, mainly from their actions, not anything Vlad did.

What happened to freedom of speech? I not only write on my blog, I often comment on other blogs. Is the threat of being sued going to damper blogging and comments? If you want to read more about this, Greg Swan wrote an article about it with lots of links at the Bloodhound Blog.

You can help preserve free speech on the net by donating to Vlad Zablotskyy’s legal aid fund on the bloodhound blog. I did.

PS: Don’t be afraid to comment on my blog, ePerks doesn’t read it. Just click the comments link.

Happy investing,

Ned