Today I attended the ReBarCamp event in San Francisco.
Start of the day
First of all it's in the Swedish American Hall. Pretty wired for a Sweden who has travelled half over the world!
Anyway, there are some 100+ people here and for most of them (including me) it's there first visit to a conference set up as a Barcamp., which means that it is "user generated conferences . In other words, it is up to the crowd to on the spot create the sessions.
So there was quite a confusing crowd in the beginning, but quickly a great list of sessions were created.
Then the sessions started and the conversations for sure kicked off.
How many conversations do you find in the photo below?
Below are quick notes from some of the sessions I attended.
Blog survey
The Center for Real Estate and Social Technology (http://varbuzz.com/crest/) has conducted a survey among bloggers in the USA. They will do those surveyes every quarter.
Result from the first survey
128 responses
Agents 65%
Brokers 23%
50% using WordPress (especially the veterans)
50% hosted
The median start date is 1 aug 2007
The median is 12 post in may 2008
Medium number of comments 3,4 per post
80% had fewer than 50 commments in may
The more posts you put in the less comments per post
1315 uniqe browsers per month is average
Ideal for traffic is 5 posts per week
35 medium RSS subscribers is average
Full RSS feed --> more readers
The crew from Zipvo organised an open discussion about video.
It seems to really start coming off over here.
The discussion was primarily around;
1. type of camera
2. "start now, even if the quality isn't there, you will learn"
3. the business model for the video platforms out there
Podcasting
A great conversation that covered everything from showing audio software to discussing why to use podcasts on an agents site.
The answer for the latter question was according to one of the participants;
"The consumer will come to your site for three reasons;
1. to figure out what his house is worth
2. to view the listings
3. to learn about the community
And it is in the last point that you could successfully add Podcasts."
The sum up was (as for video session above) start easy and focus to improve.
An easy starting point is TalkShoe.
Beer with bloggers
After all the sessions the crowd went to the bar next door for the Inman Conference kick off party "Beer with bloggers".
Thanks Zillow for the open bar.
To sum up
Not only did I learn a lot about the US market and what topics are 'hot', also had the opportunity to meet up with people I prio only know through their blogs.
Furthermore, I did also get a hand on experience of BarCamps. For sure liked the concept! Tomorrow starts the Inman Conference. A more 'normal' conference. I sure that will be as great as of today.