Real Estate Search Engines

A good summary article of real estate search engines and their design by way of introducing a new player, Roost.

Real-Estate Search Engine Roost Launches With Full MLS Listings

What makes Roost different is that, instead of trying to list all properties in the U.S. as Zillow or CyberHomes do, or take in feeds from individual real estate brokers as Trulia does, it is negotiating with Multiple Listing Services (MLSs) in each metro area to get a comprehensive set of houses on sale. Redfin also taps into the MLS. (The MLS is what real-estate brokers contributeto and use to find homes on the market, and up until recently MLS data was well-guarded from the Web). Roost launches with more than a dozen cities/MLSs, including Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Philadelphia, San Diego, and Washington, D.C. (Notably absent are San Francisco and New York).

Try out ReadBurner

The new ReadBurner service is a winner.  I’ve included the following post from their development blog from yesterday.  It looks like they are tweaking all the things.  The one difficult thing remaining looks like reducing the number of duplicates, which is surprisingly small already.  This is definitely one to add in to your Pipes, AideRSS, or FeedHub if you got them.

ReadBurner

I’ve integrated another filter to show items with a minimum definable share count. It’s not yet integrated into the interface. Sorry folks - I just need some rest. You can still use and play around with it by manipulating the Get Parameters in the URL. Just add &ms=3 for a minimum share count of 3 shares. This is particularly interesting for the most recent section. You can hide away all the one time shared items.

The parameter also works for the RSS feeds. Here’s an example for Most Recent | English | min 3 shares

http://www.readburner.com/rss.php?s=mr&l=1&ms=3

There’s another little update for the RSS feeds: you can now see the Autho, the Source and how many people shared it right in Google Reader.

WordPress Reels in NYT

Apparently The New York Times joined in to infuse $29 million into WordPress’s parent company.

Photo Matt » Act Two

That brings us to today. The New York Times, the flagship of media, is joining our existing investors Polaris, True, and Radar in expanding their minority stake in the company. Automattic is now positioned to execute on our vision of a better web not just in blogging, but expanding our investment in anti-spam, identity, wikis, forums, and more — small, open source pieces, loosely joined with the same approach and philosophy that has brought us this far.