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Transformationage.org
Extraordinary transformations are taking place in our lives due in large
part to the impact of information technology. Businesses are transitioning from
the physical to the virtual, often with unexpected results. Meet those who are
striving to remain competitive and survive in this new age of discovery and
constant change. What is the next big thing?
Webopedia.com's Did you know?
Online encyclopedia dedicated
to computer technology. If it's about computers and the web, your answer is
probably here. |
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There are a few exceptionally good real estate blogs on the net. Below are a
few among the best and most useful... offering some great contemporary thinking
and insight into the future of real estate marketing and the web.
1000 Watt
Blog
1000wattblog.com provides consulting services to real estate
companies, media organizations and startups that want to define real estate's
future. Find some great articles on the future of real estate.
MyTech
Opinion
Mytechopinion.com digs through those techy offerings out there to
identify key products and services to benefit your real estate business.
Future
of Real Estate Marketing
The Future of Real Estate Marketing blog
examines the impact of Web 2.0 and the Internet on real estate and real estate
marketing.
Idea
Driven Marketing.com
IdeaDrivenMarketing examines the convergence of
marketing with politics, culture, society and the global economy. This blog
offers timely commentary as well as practical advice and strategies on how to
improve your marketing and communications in a world that increasingly is
digitally centered.
Transparentre.com
Pat Kitano authors Transparent Real Estate.
He's co-Founder, Managing Principal of Domus Consulting Group, a management
consulting firm working with real estate brokerages and Web 2.0 companies to
develop technology marketing strategies, and with venture investors on new
business models.
RealEstateTomato.com
The Real Estate Tomato is not just a
real estate marketing blog. It was built to be a hub to help the real estate
community to better understand how to embrace the blog as the center of their
marketing efforts.
SocialMediaSystems.com/blog
Provide social media marketing,
social media website design and search engine marketing services. Their blogs
are full of good advice, how to's, and what's going on out there.
FBS Blog
Conversations about
the MLS industry, creating software, and employee ownership.
AgentGenius.com
Agent Genius
is a multi-author real estate blog designed by and for real estate agents nation
wide. Unlike other real estate blogs that blog at the consumer, we blog beside
the consumer. We talk about whats hot in technology, new and inventive real
estate business models, the nature of the real estate industry, hot topics that
impact consumers and so much more…
RealBlogging.com
A professional community sharing insightful
ideas shaping the real estate industry today.
Inman.com/blog
Where real
estate and technology
connect... |
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So you want to start your own blog? There are several sites on the net that
offer free blogs... these are a few of our favorites.
Blogger.com
Google's
blog app... sign up for a Gmail account first and receive the keys to the Google
Kingdom.
Wordpress.com
At
Wordpress.com You can get a blog started in less time than it takes you to read
this sentence. All you need is an email address and a name. You can blog as much
as you want for free, your blog can be public to the world or private for just
your friends, and our paid upgrades are completely optional.
About.com's - Using Blogs to build your real estate
career.
Great collection of articles, tools, tutorials, and resources
about creating a real estate blog using WordPress.
Ping-O-Matic
If you have a
blog, this is a handy tool... Pingomatic.com is a free service to alert the
search engines that you've updated your
blog. |
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Oline communities for real estate industry professionals...
ActiveRain.com is a free
online community for real estate professionals; an amalgamation of social
networking, blogging, and viral marketing, all designed to help you promote and
grow your business. A safe place to learn new skills and develop your online
presence.
Biznik.com ...
business networking that doesn't suck. This is a great business networking
community for anyone growing a business. It's about collaboration. It's about
real world events, meeting people face to face, sharing info, ideas, and
knowledge through events.
Facebook.com has over 100 million members... that's larger than
most countries! You probably know someone here?
LinkedIn.com is a vast network of
industry experts and professionals. Find inside connections when looking for new
opportunities, share advice, leads, and ideas with industry experts. |
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More
about it... |
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Need a place for your team to meet? Have projects or ongoing conversations
with a group? Need a simple way to manage it? There are several very good free
and/or inexpensive collaboration tools out there... here's a few recent
finds.
Limewire.com
LimeWire is a fast, easy-to-use file sharing
program that contains no spyware, adware or other bundled software. Compatible
with all major platforms and running over the Gnutella network, LimeWire's open
source code, is freely available to the public and developed in part by a
devoted programmer community.
wetpaint.com
Wetpaint powers websites that tap the power of
collaborative thinking. The heart of the Wetpaint advantage is its ability to
allow anyone, especially those without technical skill, to create and contribute
to websites written for and by those who share a passion or interest.
PBwiki Instead of having your
documents and knowledge scattered in multiple repositories, PBwiki offers one
central place to store files and collaborate – so everyone on your team can
access what they need, from any location.
mindmeister.com MindMeister
brings the concept of mind mapping to the web, using its facilities for
real-time collaboration to allow truly global brainstorming sessions. Users can
create, manage and share mind maps online and access them anytime, from
anywhere.
unyte.com A
quick and easy way to bring people and information together online.
IBM Lotus
Sametime Unyte Share lets you show your desktop or share documents and
applications with
anyone, anytime, anywhere.
yuuguu.com You can work with up to
30 people any time online for free with the personal edition.
ScreenToaster If you need to
record what happens on your screen for any reason--to show how an application
works, for example--try this simple-to-use Web service. Head to the site and
press Alt-S, and it records every action you take. Press Alt-S again, and it
stops. You can edit what you record, including adding titles and audio. You can
then upload your video to the ScreenToaster site or to YouTube, or download it
to your PC. |
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SEOchat.comGreat resources
for search engine optimization, website marketing, all about engine spiders, and
keywords etc. RealtyStar.comReal Estate software, contact management and
productivity, web solutions and hosting. walkscore.comWalk Score shows you a map of what's nearby and
calculates a Walk Score for any property. wayfaring.comIf you really
want to explore our world, Wayfaring's social mapping is the way to go. Based on
Google Maps, your search is enhanced through a social networking interface.
zooomr.comOnline photo
sharing, infinite upload interface... with captioning, organizing, geotagging,
and share tools. backpackit.comMake it easy to organize your thoughts, no
matter what they are... Create lists and reminders; add notes, links, and
versatile write boards. Share your pages and collaborate. Email new entires to
your pages. soonr.comSyncs your files and Outlook to SoonR's website and
get remote access. blinkx.com12 million hours of video. Blinkx grabs videos
from the entire web. Organized with full-motion thumbnails. widgetbox.comMost blogs are
boring. Widgetbox gives you a ton of tools for cynamic content. ajax13.comAjax13 is one of the
best free online office suites. Offers a word processor, excel like spreadsheet,
drawing, and a powerpoint presentation program. meebo.comMeebo gives you slick
intuitive access to all major Information Management services from one place,
including AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, Google Talk, and Jabber. yousendit.comShare big
files. Yousendit lets you send single attachments of up to 100MB for free.
Acrobat Reader - downloadMajorGeeks.comZDNetStay Safe OnlineAnti-Virus
HelpDoug Muth's (quirky and a bit strange) web site full of great
anti-virus information and resources. McAfeeMcAfee Security - virus software, tools and resources.
SymantecInformation
on current viruses. Vmyths.comLearn about computer virus myths, hoaxes and urban
legends. |
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Working
with digital images |
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Get your digital images ready for your website, blog, virtual tour, or emails
with these tools...
FastStone.com Image Viewer 3.6 (freeware)... An image browser,
converter and editor that supports all major graphic formats. It has a nice
array of features such as image viewing, management, comparison, red-eye
removal, emailing, resizing, cropping, color adjustments, musical slideshow and
more...
picnik.com Nothing to
install, awesome online digital picture editor... Do it all on the web! The free
version has most of the tools you'll ever need, and it's the easiest editor to
use I've ever seen.
GIMP.org GIMP is an acronym
for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed program for such
tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It has many
capabilities. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo
retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image
renderer, an image format converter, etc.
Paint.net is a free image and
photo editing program much like photoshop, for windows. Intuitive interface with
special effects, layers, and a lot of useful tools.
Splashup.com like Paint.net,
is online, free, and like photoshop. Great easy to use tools... |
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Graphic
Design |
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Useful
and creative graphic design resources on the web the offer downloadables such as
stock photos, textures/patterns, brushes, icons, and fonts that designers have
decided to share with others in the community.
Flickr,
the premier site for online photo-sharing and the hangout of many designers and
photographers, has a section called Flickr: Creative Commons that allows you to quickly view
user-submitted images that have a Creative Commons license.
morguefile contains user-submitted stock photographs
contributed by many artists. morguefile has a terrific organization scheme and
thumbnail preview for quicker searches. Also check out morguefile’s very
active forums to find tutorials and to converse with
artists that are members of the site.
stock.xhchng (also known as SXC) is a very popular
photo-sharing and stock photography site with over 380,000 stock photos. And
if that wasn’t enough for you, they also have a tutorials section that covers photography/graphic design
topics.
Stockvault.net is another excellent photo-sharing site for
designers and photographers. The community boasts almost 14,000 members and over 3,000 photographers ensuring that
you’ll have more than plenty of high-quality stock photos to sift through.
everystockphoto is a search engine for free photos. It
currently indexes close to 5
million photos. You can sign up for a free user
account so that you can take
advantage of nifty site features such as the ability to save collections of
photos for future reference.
Textures
and Patterns
CG
Textures is an excellent texture
site created by 3D artist Marcel Vijfwinkel. CG Textures
is structured to help you quickly find types of textures such as Grunge andNature textures, but if you’re looking for
something/someone specific, use theAdvanced Search for more specific searches.
Squidfingers
/ Patterns is a collection of
useful and intricate patterns that you can use as repeating CSS backgrounds or
on print work. Squidfingers / Patterns is the work of graphic designer and
programmer extraordinaire, Travis Beckham.
TextureKing is a fast-growing, high-resolution texture
repository maintained by creative agency, REH3design. There are currently over 300 stock
textures - usually available at
1,600 x 1,200 pixels. TextureKing is currently working on giving users the
ability to submit their own textures to share.
Image
* After is a large collection of
free photos and textures. The site provides images and textures that are
available for personal, as well as commercial, purposes.
Lost
and Taken is a blog-style
repository of copyright-free stock textures created and maintained by
photographer and writer, Caleb Kimbrough. Lost and Taken takes
requests and suggestions, so if you can’t find something – try to send in a
suggestion.
Brushes
and Vectors
BrushKing offers a wide array of Adobe Photoshop
brushes, all free for download. The site currently archives over 4,000 brushes and over 200 brush sets.
PS
Brushes.net shares beautiful and
high-quality brush sets organized in a variety of categories such as the Patterns category and the Drawings category. If you’d
like to see the full collection of brushes, check out the All Brushes category.
Vecteezy is a site that indexes free vector graphics
by some of the top graphic designers in the world. Vecteezy also allows users
to submit vectors to be indexed. Vecteezy has a sister site
called Brusheezy which indexes free Adobe Photoshop
brushes.
QVectors shares and showcases free, high-quality
vector images and artwork from around the web. QVectors has a sister site
called QBrushes which highlights top-notch Adobe Photoshop
brushes.
FreeVectors.net is an online gallery that features free
vector graphics by talented graphic artists. The vectors showcased on
FreeVectors.net are available for personal and commercial use.
Icons
Iconfinder is a search engine specifically for icons,
developed and maintained byGlassbox. Iconfinder also has a tag cloud
page so that you can visually see
the most popular keyword tags.
Free
Icons Web is an index of over 15,000 high-quality and free
icons for graphic and web
designs, as well as icons for the desktop. If you’re looking exclusively for
icons in GIF format, check out the GIF Icons section.
Icon
Archive currently hosts 22,000
high-quality desktop and web icons. They have over 800 icon sets from
close to 200 icon designers. Some categories on the site include Business
Icons, Computer
Icons, and Vintage
Icons.
IconBuffet, an icon foundry that
sells icon artwork for web designs, has a variety of free icons in the IconBuffet Free Delivery section. Their icon sampling includes sets
such as Retro
Snow and Tonkawa
Tiles.
Fonts
dafont.com is a repository of public domain, freeware,
shareware, and demo fonts from some of the top font designers and foundries.
With excellent organization and searchability features, it’s a great resource to
visit for free fonts. Check out the Top 100 to see the most popular fonts on the
site.
Better
Fonts has a large collection of
free fonts organized alphabetically and in several categories that include Retro fonts, Graffiti fonts,
and Handwritten
fonts. The site’s unique feature is that they provide live previews of all the fonts so that you can test the
fonts before downloading and installing them.
General
Resources - User-submitted, Search, and Blogs
deviantART is the premier community for graphic
artists. The downloadable graphic design resources are from community members
and you will find absolutely everything in deviantArt, including vectors, brushes, textures, and much more.
Wikimedia
Commons is a media file repository
that takes user-submitted publicly-available and freely-licensed media content.
Wikimedia currently hosts over 3.7 million individual
files organized several ways
such as by topic (i.e. Art and People) and by type (i.e. Photos, Symbols, and Drawings).
The Creative Commons Search by the Creative Commons organization is a search engine for
CC-licensed media files. It allows you to search various sites (such as Flickr
and Google) all in one convenient spot.
Designer
Jay Hilgert offers a host of freebies on his design blog, BittBox. He has a regular post
series called "Free Texture Tuesday" (here’s one
of them) where he shares useful textures every Tuesday.
Graphic
and web designer Chris Spooner offers a host of freebies along with useful and
informative blog posts on the topic of design. You’ll find a variety of freebies
such as the wildly popular Hand
Drawn Doodle Icon Set and Wavy
Vector Ribbon graphics.
PSDTUTS,
a site that gives Photoshop tutorials and information, has a growing freebie
section submitted by a wide variety of designers. Among the things you can find
from PSDTUTS are high-res texture
packs and Photoshop brushes.
Smashing
Magazine, a weblog dedicated to designers and developers, has a freebies
section that includes a variety of freebies exclusively released for them. You
can find icon sets, Photoshop brushes, buttons, and vectors - amongst other
things.
GoMediaZine,
a community for designers, has an excellent Freebies section that has vectors
and free Photoshop brushes. |
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Website
and SEO Tools |
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There are a several tools on the net that aggregate useful SEO related
information on one page. Here are a few where you can quickly evaluate any page
and get ranking information, keyword analysis, linking stats, traffic counts,
and more.
QuarkBase.com
Website Grader
CubeStat.com
Statbrain.com
Popuri.us
Test Everything
SEOchat.com
Great
resources for search engine optimization, website marketing, all about engine
spiders, and keywords etc.
Google's Keyword Tool
An important part of driving traffic
to your website is using the right keywords... Keywords are the words and
phrases that the consumer uses when they search the internet. Use Google’s free
Keyword Tool to find the highest ranking and most used keywords in your
market... test your keywords, view statistics, get suggestions...
SEObook Rank Checker
Firefox extension
allows you to check your search engine rankings. Just enter your website URL,
the keywords, and find out your positions for Google, Yahoo, and MSN.
SEO for Firefox
This tool is awesome. It
lets you see relevant data about the best ranked websites for a given keyword.
Once you understand why others are ranking so well, you can copy their
strategy.
SEObook Toolbar
Great information such as
PageRank, incoming links, and traffic data.
Keyword Difficulty Tool
This tool
allows you to check how difficult it will be to rank for a certain
keyword.
Page Analyzer
This tool allows you to
check several vital metrics at once.
Keyword Density Analyzer
Excellent keyword
density tool. This is another Keyword Density Analyzer tool that I like a
lot.
Visual PageRank Tool
A great way to see
the PageRank of all the pages on your website.
Backlink Checker
The most powerful free
backlink tool available.
Keyword Competition Check Tool
You will
love this one. Enter the keyword you want to rank for and you can see an
analysis of your top 10 competitors.
Robots.txt Generator
Use this tool to
control what pages you want the search engines to index from your
website.
CopyScape
Very useful service that allows
you to check and avoid duplicate content.
NameBoy
Having your keywords in the URL of
your website is very important. This cool application suggests available domains
based on the keywords you want to rank for.
Search Engine Optimization Analysis
Tool
A great way to analyze your pages and improve them for the
search engines.
Search Engine Spider Simulator
This tool
shows you a website just like the search engines see it.
Backlink Builder
Very useful backlink
tool. Enter a keyword and it returns a list of websites where you can list your
own site and get valuable backlinks.
Backlink Summary
See who is linking to
your competitors and ask them for links too.
Google Keyword Tool
Hands down, the
best free keyword tool available. Find related keywords and find out the search
volume of several keywords at once.
PageRank Search
Sort search results by
PageRank. Very cool.
SEOmoz SEO Tools
Probably the best
collection of SEO tools in the market. Some of them are paid but most are
free. |
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Security
Optimization |
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Comodo Firewall Pro is rated
as one of the top tools of its kind and it's free...
avast.com is a lightweight
antivirus utility that runs fast and scans e-mail, instant messaging, and
peer-50-peer, other threats, and it's free!
AVG.com, a great free antivirus
software and easy to configure.
spybot.com is one of my favorites, I have it on all of my
pc's... Spybot offers live protection against spyware and scans your system for
pre-existing spyware. | | | | | |
