Rain City Guide

I really enjoyed today’s conversation with Tracy Records of the West Seattle Blog.  Tracy shared a ton of great stories with us and I learned a ton…
Click here to listen to the entire interview!
And below are some links to some of the things we discussed:

Capital Hill Seattle
MyBallard.com
Exit 133.com in Tacoma
Angelina’s Tottoria
West 5: try the [...]

I’ve been having such a blast with the 4realz Roundtable conversations, that I’m going to bring the conversation to Rain City Guide!
The idea: this Tuesday at 4pm, I’m going to host a conversation with the Rain City Guide community. There are many ways to join the conversation and all of them are easy. All [...]

I’ve never been one for rules, but in preparing to take on a new RCG contributor, I thought it might be a good time to articulate some of the informal rules that we seem to have developed on the site in order to bring together such an interesting crew (often with competing interests!)
But [...]

Step 1… I wish it were so simple I could give a step-by-step process!
My take is that creating vibrant community is tough and there is obviously no simply step-by-step method that would work. However, my experience is that I get the most out of RCG when I focus on making sure that [...]

Even before we were done building out the InsideBu website, I recommended that Madison start doing some research. And I started by advising him to fill up his sidepanel with links. My logic is that the process of building up a blogroll forces a new blogger to read other bloggers. [...]

Randy (husband) and I are buying a new home in Issaquah Highlands, a neighborhood I really love. Won’t we be neighbors, Robbie?  Reminds me of Queen Anne with the local community feel.  It was supposed to be the new home for Microsoft, but the company decided to stay in Redmond although Issaquah Highlands is home to many [...]

Out of all the sessions at the Blog Business Summit, the session on building online communities held a special place of interest for me. In many ways, I simply happened upon the community that I’ve built at RCG, so it was refreshing to hear the speakers articulating thoughts I’ve had on how to build a [...]

One of the most interesting sessions I attended at Mind Camp was led by Dan from Biznik on Social Networking. Social networking tools allow people to share information about themselves, other people and other things (like photos, products, etc) in a setting that attempts to foster a certain level of trust among users. For [...]

Most of you have (or should have) read the recent article by STEPHEN J. DUBNER and STEVEN D. LEVITT (Freakonomics) in the NY Times. As may be expected, there were plenty comments on the Freakonomics Blog. As I was reading the comments, one struck me. It was from a very sincere sounding [...]

Maybe I’m becoming a blog snob, but I’m seeing more and more BAD marketing advice about blogs as they relate to real estate agents. A lot of people simply don’t understand the marketing potential of blogs and rather than giving useful advice, a lot of marketing “gurus” are stepping up to deliver advice designed [...]