I've Got To Be Honest, I'm Really Not Into This Place

I've written a bunch about the emotional aspects of the home buying experience.

In a series of posts on Sex And Real Estate, I reviewed the excellent book by Marjorie Garber by the same name. The emotional triggers that cause us to fall in love with a home often overwhelm the "information" that is presented about. There's no denying it. I have personally rationalized away the fact that the home I was about to buy didn't have enough bedrooms because it just "felt like home." I was in love with it.

I couldn't resist posting this hilarious video. It illustrates just how strong these triggers can be. It wouldn't be so funny if it weren't so true. :)

Happy Memorial Day

Happy Memorial Day to everyone on ActiveRain!

My country,’ tis of thee,
sweet land of liberty,
of thee I sing;
land where my fathers died,
land of the pilgrims’ pride,
from every mountainside
let freedom ring!

Me.Dium May Be A Perfect Fit

I stumbled upon a social browsing site that immediately caught my eye - it's called Me.Dium.

What is Me.Dium? By their own definition, "Me.dium is a social browsing software company offering a browser extension that allows people to surf with friends." Me.Dium was founded in 2006 and is compatible with a range of browsers in addition to Microsoft Internet Explorer, including Firefox, Flock, and The Songbird Media Player.

The Me.Dium browser extension presents a visual depiction of what your "friends" are looking at online at that exact moment. What makes Me.Dium unique is that everything in Me.Dium is always presented in real time. If I give you permission, you could see what URL I'm looking at right this very moment.

Now, I know for many of you that sounds a bit scary. Many of you will have privacy concerns. I understand. I had to ask myself this question: Do I really want people knowing my every move online? Perhaps not, but I' like to consider the potential benefits of anything before simply writing it off. The only way I know to do that is to actually try it. :)

It should be noted that you can set yourself to "invisible" anytime you like. So, if you want to hide, you certainly can. I have been using Me.Dium for over a week now and have only invited and followed a very small number of people. The people I invited were folks who surf the web looking for solutions and ideas as a matter of course in their daily lives. They spend a good amount of their time in "exploration" mode and I knew that being able to see what they were looking at in real time might present some opportunities for discussion.

I recorded a short video of my first use of Me.Dium so you can see how it works.

Me.dium Seems To Fit Pretty Darn Good from respres on Vimeo.

How might this be used in your real estate world?

Me.Dium was not built to be a business application, but I think it could have some strong business uses. You'll have your own ideas, but here are a few ideas that come to mind.

• Learning From Trusted Sources: Friend and follow those whose opinions you respect. Join them as they are exploring a site you've not seen yet. Chat with them instantly about their thoughts.
• Timely Local Conversations: Invite a few of your local real estate friends and use the sidebar. Alert each other to timely news in your local area. Chat in real time about the issue, event or finding.
• Discuss New Listings: Friend other agents and brokers in your local area and use the tool to chat about new homes for sale or problems around specific listings.
• Social Search: Looking for something and just can't seem to find it? Enlist your friends to help you search. We all search differently. So two heads (or 10) may be better than one.
  

My personal opinion is that Me.Dium is a tool that will be best utilized with a small number of people at a time. The visual window is not very large, so populating it with as many followers as I have on Twitter, for example, would make for a tangled mess of activity. It would simply be visually impossible to follow the movements.

I have a few suggestions. Since I am certain the folks responsible for making changes to Me.Dium will be reading this post, I have 2 simple suggesstions that would make this a more powerful exploration tool for business purposes.

• Friend Groups: Allow me to organize friends into groups so I can follow a certain group at certain times. And allow people to be placed more than one group.
  
• Selective Hiding: Allow me to hide myself from some people, but not others. There are times when I might like to use this for private exploration within a tighter circle of friends, or just my co-workers. Right now, I can only set myself to visible or invisible.

Me.Dium is one of those applications that you have to try for yourself. So, if you'd like to give it a test run, go install the browser plugin and find me. I'm respres on Me.Dium. I will have it running almost continuously.

I Have A Brand New Son

There is a new child living in our house.

He looks exactly like the 7-year old who was living here before. He wears the same clothes and he sleeps in the same bed. But he's not the same child. Not even close. He's happier, funnier, more loving and more in contol.

My wife wrote about these changes in great detail on her personal blog. First with "Meeting My Son For The First Time" and then with "Our Life Is Different Now." We don't use our kids names online, so Rocky always referred to our 7-year old as "Mad Man I" whenever she wrote about him. It was an apt description.

On our trip cross country to West Virginia last year, my wife and I almost pulled out our hair. He was beyond out of control at times. And we were at a complete loss on how to deal with the situation. We have five other children, but none of the techniques we used with them were working on him. He displayed all of the symptoms associated with ADD, ADHD, or ODD (Oppositional Defiant Disorder).

He was, as my wife describes, like a time bomb waiting to go off. When he was good, he was overwhelmingly good. But when he exploded, it was unbelievable. And we had NO desire to put him on medications. We didn't want to loose the spark that made him who he was.

Then A Miracle Occurred. 

I call it a miracle because the change has been so dramatic that I find myself staring at him like a long lost friend, smiling and thinking to myself, "wow, where have you been for so long.?" And all it took was a change of diet.

The solution came right after my wife's recent trip to Africa. His teacher had had enough and suggested we take a high protein diet approach to see what would happen. The first day he was better, but the second day he had one of his worst afternoons ever. His morning was fine, but the rest of the day was a nightmare. Then my wife realized he had purchased lunch that day and found out he had ordered a Cherry Slushy with his lunch. That's not a normal thing.

That one fact caused my wife to ask questions she'd never asked before and finally led her to this article, "Is Red 40 Food Dye Additive Having A Negative Impact On Your Child?"

When she read the symptoms, they fit our son like a glove. So, we went completely organic, first just with him and then with the entire family. I can tell you that what I have witnessed is nothing short of a miracle. The spark that made "Mad Man I" unique is still there, but the time bomb has been difused. His name has been officially changed to "Funny Man." I literally cried when she wrote it for the first time.

This morning he quietly made his way into our bedroom.

It was just before 6am. He was already dressed and ready for school and said he'd been up reading for about 30 minutes, quietly. He then crawled up betwen us and laid there, still, as we both cuddled with him.

There is a new child living in our house. And I'm Falling In Love All Over Again!

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Why am I writing about this here on ActiveRain? Because I know that my wife and I are not alone. We hear stories almost daily from friends who are struggling with similar issues and don't want to put their children on ADD Medication. If you know someone who is struggling with the same kinds of behavioral issues, forward them my wife's posts above. They go into a great deal more detail than I have gone into here. It may be what they need for their own miracle.

Getting Your Blog Into A WidgetBox - A Video Tutorial

Your email inbox should be the greatest resource for blog post ideas.

That thought is certainly not original to me. Many have said this. They say it because it's true. It's certainly true for me.

The other day I received the following in an email from Anita Carrington: "How do I get the WidgetBox without ending up with your blog running on my page."

When I get an email like this, I often send back a quick response if I think it can be answered easily. If I've already answered the question in an existing blog post, I send a link. But if a followup question returns, that's usually an indication that I've either not answered the right question or I'm not seeing things the way the person who emailed me is seeing things. It also indicates to me that others may have the same question.

So, Anita, and anyone else who might have this question, this post is for you. :)

ActiveRain Tutorial: WidgetBox from respres on Vimeo.