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^{2003 December 31, 11:59 PM}
Farewell, 2003; Welcome, 2004: Father time is slipping over the horizon and I have high hopes for the new year. If nothing else, it should be a banner year for Court TV as celebrity trials will soon be vying for air time. I'm not holding out a lot of hope for closure on terrorism or trials for Saddam or Usama or their minions, but no doubt if any of those do get to a courtroom in the '04 calendar year we can expect coverage to mask almost anything that happens in the rest of the world.

Here at the Swann household we are going to be spending a lot of 2004 remodeling baths and kitchen. Since our track record for finishing projects in a timely manner is dismal we'll just forget about any other resolutions for the new year.

Meanwhile, we wish the very best year of your life to the rest of you! Happy 2004!

Becky

^{December 29, 02:30 AM}
To Think or not to Think, that is the question:

I feel I have found a kindred spirit in Baghdad.

Faiza, mother of three young men, writes in Arabic, but her sons and their friends are kind enough to provide translations in English for which I am very grateful. I am reproducing one particular entry in to her family's blog so you won't have to search for it unless you want to, but in addition to Faiza's perspective you can see what her sons of varying ages (guess which one is the teenager!) have to say and how their own independence is reflected in their attitudes (some of which make me laugh, others make me cringe).

Faiza writes:

"I was born in Baghdad and lived in it for a long time. I left this city and came back to it after 15 years. I left her in 1976 after I graduated from college and got married and came back to her after the first Gulf war with my husband and three kids. I never became part of a political movement or party and never liked the idea, because I have the feeling that when you become a member in any political party you become like a slave who doesn't make his own decisions anymore.
"Especially in third world countries where people have not yet fully matured their political experience in a healthy and natural way. The loyalty to the party became tainted with personal benefits for the member, his relative and friends....
"When I returned to Baghdad I found that the people, young, old, men and women have become Baathists, willingly or against their will. Some announce the fact and prides themselves on it and don't mind working the situation for their own benefit and others are ashamed and try to find excuses.
"I saw people wrong each other, the strong eating the weak.
"Even the weak don't stop from abusing his situation to get something out of someone who is weaker than their self or is a good hearted fool.

"I didn't like saddam. I was never one of his applauders or one of the climbers who were just after a lucrative deal. And when a customer comes to buy some water purification equipment from the store and says he is sent by Mr. Uday or the minister of Interior affairs Watban, my heart feels heavy, I sit behind my desk and become speechless!
"I have no wish to deal with such tedious clients. I don't like to be a hypocrite nor to be too frank with them and say something they don't like and get myself in trouble.
"When the 'happy' occasions would come, like Mr. President's birthday, and those heroic young men come knocking on the shop's door asking us to contribute in an ad in the newspaper congratulating the president on his birthday, or asking for money as a contribution to the happy celebrations, they know it is blackmail, nothing else, but who is to say no? And the newspapers are filled with hypocritical poems of love and praise Mr. President our leader.
"Today I wonder, there are in Iraq more than 100 newspapers now, some are party mouthpieces some are independent, in some of these papers the staff who work were journalists before. Yesterday they used to cheer, applaud, lie and give lip service to live....Now they do the same but they curse, make fun of and use bad language to describe the former [Mr. president, our leader] who is now [the cowardly dictator].... now why are they doing this? To live? Or to let out years of buried hate?
"Those who used to act like they are competing in a Master of Hypocricy competition just to get more and more privileges for themselves or their kids are the ones who are most ready for big changes because they do not have any principles or credibility. They will never be trustworthy because they are selfish and slaves to anyone with power and money
"I am confused, have these people been corrupted by saddam or were they like this always and there is no way to deal with them?
"I am depressed and have a headache. "

I never looked at my own resistance to political labels in quite this way, perhaps because I have had the benefit of living all my adult life in Texas where voter registration does not require any declaration of party affiliation or membership. Some years I vote in the Republican primary and some years I vote in the Democratic primary (and all years I decry the fact that in some races I would prefer to be able to vote in both), so it is easier here than in some other states to maintain my independent status and point of view. In any case I mostly avoid attending conventions because of the overwhelming single-minded devotion to whatever the party's current issues may be. In either gathering I am going to be a fish out of water because I don't agree with either extreme on most issues. Having occasionally been Precinct Chair, at least I can speak from personal experience at conventions.

I took a very active role in local politics for a number of years, running twice for city council and serving on various boards and committees (local politics are non-partisan in Texas, too), so I don't shy away from politics; I just don't care to be defined as Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, Conservative, Liberal or even middle-of-the-road. If I had my way everyone, at some point in his/her life, would be required to take an active role in politics on some level. One of my proudest "Grandma moments" was when my now 15-year-old grandson ran for, and won, President of his freshman high school class. From there he also became active in Town Council issues that affected teenagers. Even if he never again seeks an elected position in his life, he will always have a better grounding in how our democratic society works than the majority of his peers, and will be well prepared to think for himself.

Despite my strong opinions on most subjects, I doubt anyone could infer from a broad cross section of those opinions any particular ideology. I tend to see both sides of most issues and most times find there is no black and white, right or wrong, only a "less objectionable" position. Unfortunately for all of us, as voters we generally expect our politicians to reflect black/white, right/wrong, liberal/conservative stances. I believe this is because it makes it easier for us to relinquish the difficult task of thinking for ourselves.

Faiza is not only describing Iraqi, or middle-eastern, political failings when she says "...when you become a member in any political party you become like a slave who doesn't make his own decisions..." Too often this seems be true even among my own friends and family. When friends remark that they hate politics I believe what they mean is they hate either (1)following slavishly a doctrine they either oppose of don't understand, or (2) having to expend the energy require to think through the pros and cons of any issue. Well, life's tough, isn't it!

It isn't always easy to form your own opinions on issues such as war, abortion, welfare, Medicare, land use or education standards. If you choose not to think for yourself, someone else is more than willing to do it for you. Careful, though, it might be another Saddam.

Thinking can give me a headache, too, but it sure beats the alternative!

Becky

^{07:23 AM}
I confess to a morbid streak: One of the stops on my daily round of blogs is the Amish Tech Support DeadPool! It started innocently enough, I was looking for information one day about whether or not a certain public figure was still living. I stumbled upon the DeadPool and was momentarily offended, disgusted, inspired to complain...but that passed in an instant. My baser side took over and I began to look forward to seeing who had guessed whose demise.

Okay, so over the weekend, I submitted my own list and now I am in the pool. I'm sure you are offended, disgusted, etc. Come on and play with me.

^{2003 December 23, 04:00 PM}
Censorship and Spam Control: Google AdSense censors web sites for discussing war, terrorism and WMD (well, that takes care of 75% anything I read), and AOL censors e-mail for including links to sites deemed politically incorrect. What's a person to do?

Once upon a time I was one of those Prodigy subscribers who abandoned that ship (in 1989-90 there weren't a lot of options for online access) when the automated censorship programs in use there made communication on my favorite writers' board impossible. Discussion of Alexander Pope's "The Rape of the Lock" (an epic poem based on the stealing of a lock of hair in a family feud!) or even use of a word such as "obfuscation" (someone thought it "sounded dirty!") would not only trigger a filter that deleted your message before it got posted, but could also get your access to the forums denied! Not only were Prodigy's forums heavily censored but so was email. Add to the burden of weighing how your words might be misinterpreted by naive software, a $.25 per message fee was threatened for email (some things never change!), and I was but one of thousands who dropped Prodigy for the harder-to-use, but easier-to-communicate Genie or Delphi.

Today the problem is far more complex. On one hand, email has become truly burdensome and filled with filth and fraud, and web sites may be not only offensive and or obtrusive (how many pop-ups does it take to crash your browser?), but dangerous; on the other hand, your interests and needs are unique, not predictable by any generic filtering system. What was once a matter of protecting children from offensive content is now a matter of spending hours sorting through often vile and sometimes even dangerous megabytes of junk to find essential messages. Some kind of filtering is essential, but who is going to define the filters? Filters can't distinguish between the message you want and the one you don't want. One of the top ten keywords in spam, after p*rn and pharmaceuticals is mortgage, yet if you are in the real estate business, or in the market for real estate, you probably have legitimate email from and about lenders and mortgages, and since most real estate purchases are dependent on mortgage financing you can't afford to filter out all messages including the word "mortgage." I once had an email program that by default filtered out all messages from my good friend Dick Brown! Poor Richard!

I can't help with the Google or AOL censors, except to avoid them altogether, but perhaps I can help with the Spam filtering problem. If, like me, you want to be able to control what your spam filters do and do not block, you might want to try the fully flexible and very effective SpamSleuth. I have used this gem since August, 2002, when it was still in beta testing, and now in Version 3.0, it only gets better There are many software (MailWasher, SpamCop, etc.) and ISP-based (Earthlink, AOL, etc.) spam filters available, but SpamSleuth is all we use at IRED now, and each user has control over what mail does or does not arrive in his/her mailbox. About once a week I do some tweaking of bad words, friends (whitelist), spammers (blacklist), or scoring, but my ratio of 20 or so undesirable messages to one legitimate message has dropped to a ratios of 1 undesirable message to 20 legitimate messages! I know that occasionally a legitimate message gets lost, but since SpamSleuth allows me to keep even filtered messages for a period of time (30 days or until I manually delete them) I occasionally scan through relatively low-scoring filtered messages to see if I missed something important. In any case, I am in complete control of my mail again, and I no longer have to dread opening my mail box! For about $25 SpamSleuth is the best investment I have made in software of any kind!

My browser of choice has been Mozilla for the past 3 years or so, and unlike Microsoft's ubiquitous, but annoying, Internet Explorer, Mozilla includes a basic option to block unrequested popup windows. My second favorite feature of Mozilla is the tabbed browsing. With tabs you can have multiple web sites open without opening multiple instances of your browser, and without wasting memory resources or clogging your screen. Again, flexibility is a key advantage for me, and Mozilla is free and frequently updated, and I don't recall a single time the Mozilla folks introduced a major bug, or if they did it was promptly fixed thanks to the open source, multiple developer method they use. Opera ($39) is good, but Mozilla is free.

Becky

^{2003 December 17, 08:00 PM}
What's simple about "The Simple Life?": I have really tried to see the humor in this "reality" series, but I give up. Tonight Nicole and Paris decided that while they were buying feed for the cattle auction house (Wow! Shopping!), they might as well tack on any items they could find that they might want, including a "gift" for their host. Ha-ha, $120, but it's not money, it just a charge account...someone else's charge account! It seems that Nicole suffers from Charge Account Disease in addition to her heroin (or maybe it's cocaine) addiction. All I can see is a couple of delinquents with no redeeming value at all. I hope that this cycle of unscripted, over-edited, television runs its course soon.

On the other hand, maybe this could give us insight into how legislatures think when spending our money: it's not stealing, it's just Charge Account Disease.

Becky

^{2003 December 14, 02:00 PM}
Headline of the Day": The "millions of dollars" turned out to be $750,000, but otherwise the early AM reports seem to have been surprisingly accurate. Many Bloggers hit the keys about the same time I did. A pretty good list of reactions is summarized at Blogs for Bush so I won't list them here. Of the Iraqi bloggers, Salam Pax offers only an anemic audio report via the Guardian (UK). I suggest you skip it, and go directly to Alaa, AYS, Sam, Fayrouz, or Omar.

It was the nay-sayers who provided the most entertaining reading: The Democratic Underground comments can pretty well be summarized by this from someone who calls himself Caution: "...ANYTHING that helps Bush is a bad thing." Carrie B at the Howard Dean blogsite sums up that site's habitues' fears with "I can't believe this. I'm crying here. I feel that we now don't have a chance in this election." (Is today's news about presidential campaigns or about the end of a reign of terror in Iraq? Hard to tell from these comments.)

The Drudge Report was almost the last one to the party this morning, but he made up for his tardy reporting with the best headline of the day:

^{2003 December 14, 05:00 AM}
Saddam Hussein Captured by US Troops in Tikrit!: It's been a frustrating morning already for those of us who are awake in the wee hours of the morning. First reports of a suspected capture of Saddam in a cellar in Tikrit began dribbling in at 4AM. Naturally I turned immediately to the internet for details, rumors, speculation or even facts...but found nothing. CNN was the first Cable News source I found after a brief headline report on CBS, but no one seemed to be online. By 5 AM (Central time) the New York Times added a single breaking news headline. I finally thought to check the freerepublic.com site knowing that Freepers would be gleefully awakening everyone they knew and sharpening their claws to attack anyone who might be skeptical. So they are, but for once I have to agree with them. This is likely to be a bad day to be a Democratic Presidential candidate!

It finally occurred to me that I had not blogged anything about this astounding news, so who was I to criticize others. As of now, the Dallas Morning News has not yet reported the news either;, but bloggers can't claim to have scooped traditional media either.

Reports now indicate that millions of dollars were found in the cellar, and that DNA reports are already confirming the identity of Saddam. (How do they manage to get DNA reports so fast?) In any case, this is looking like the real deal, and I intend to celebrate this day!

Becky

^{2003 December 10, 06:00 PM}
Protesting terrorism in Baghdad: Zeyad at HealingIraq and Omar at Iraqthemodel report first hand (photos included by Zeyad thanks to Jeff Jarvis' gift of a camera) on today's anti-terror demonstration in Baghdad. Omar comments that "...it seemed like the whole Iraq was there". So where was the US media?

Becky

^{2003 December 4, 06:45 PM}
Cash for Your Old Cell Phone If you don't already have a old cell phone cluttering your desk drawer you may have one soon as new features make current phones obsolete for regular users. Program applies only to some of the more popular models so be sure you have your model number and manufacturer handy. If your phone is not listed, you can donate it to charity.

^{08:30 PM}
Google Dancing: I'm hearing a lot of whining about changes at Google this week. Actually the changes took place last month, but traffic effects are now shaking up the real estate world. I have to admit that I did not even notice the change myself until I was told.

IRED was not affected -- at least not negatively. Do a search on "real estate" and IRED is still in the top 5 results (#2 at this time). How does Google work? I don't know and don't care as long as I can find the information I need on the web. It's a major bonus that IRED can also be found by people who need real estate information. That's what we are here for. Search engines have been altering their algorithms for years. I'm not interested in wasting time trying to out guess them. The internet a great tool; search engines help me, as a user, to get the most utility from the internet. Marketing is great for the webmaster side of me, but when marketing becomes the goal instead of the method, the entire internet begins to cave in upon itself.

IRED has never played games with search engines, it is a real estate directory, and makes no effort to pose as anything else. We are asked frequently how we maintain high rankings on search engines but rarely do we even comment. Why should we give away our "secrets," if we have any? Actually we suggest the key is simply relevance and dependability. We have been on the web for almost 9 years, with a site that is maintained daily, has good traffic and has many links back, with no coercion I might add. Never have we required a reciprocal link, though thousands voluntarily do so.

As the nature of the internet has evolved we have become a lot more selective about what we include in the IRED directories, too. Originally we reviewed and assigned ratings to all real estate related sites, but now we don't list sites we consider either unrelated to our core business, or which offer no value in our opinion. It may not be a secret, but it seems to carry weight with search engines, who like IRED before them, are constantly trying to find a way to offer relevance to users, instead of catering to the listees.

Maybe Google's recent "dance" is to increase ad revenue, as some have suggested, but if so it is apt to backfire if search results are not what the user wants. It's a balancing act as revenue is essential to being a viable enterprise, but without relevance there is no audience, and ultimately no revenue. If users don't get what they want, there is no market; if marketers get everything they want, there is little that users want.

In the blogging world the hot button lately as been the closely related subject of hit counters and who has the highest "hit count." Cheating seems to be rampant, and defeating the cheaters appears to be of consuming interest to the hit counters. As spam is overwhelming e-mail, the competition for hits and links is overwhelming both the world wide web and the blog world. The real game is to achieve a balance of visibility with utility. Even the most insightful bloggers get really boring when they start fretting about their position on the hit counters, here or here, for example. YAWN

Becky

If, as some have suggested, this was a PR ploy, it was very badly timed, since Thanksgiving Day in the US is almost entirely devoted to parades, gluttony and football! I have almost given up on watching news channels since they are so enamored of Michael Jackson, Scott Peterson and Paris Hilton that real news -- minor things like war, terrorism, and international relations -- is relegated to illegible scrolls at the bottom of the screen. No, I learned about the surprise visit to the troops in Baghdad on my daily rounds of the blog world, specifically Jeff Jarvis' Buzzmachine

Incidentally, I wish I were a better blogger myself, but I get so carried away reading my own favorites, and following links to new favorites, that I barely get my real work done, much less take the time to expound on these pages!

^{8:20 PM}
Dell Moves Tech Support Back to US from India: Hurray! We have been loyal users of Dell computers since 1991, but this year we had made a decision to seek a new vendor. Only once or twice a year does someone at IRED require tech support from Dell, but when we need it, we need it now, and we need it accurate! After our most recent two day marathon with the Indian tech support staff we finally had to hire a local on site techie guru to come in to find and fix the very problem we had specifically identified to Dell tech support. The local techie solved the problem in minutes, and our original assessment of the cause had been correct. (We were sure we knew the cause of the problem, but not how to correct it ourselves.)

Why didn't Dell provide the solution? Apparently it was not in their script. The Dell tech, whom we found it difficult to understand in the first place, and impossible to communicate with once tempers on both ends were frayed, insisted the problem could not be with Dell's software or hardware, but had to be a third party...blah, blah, blah... you know the drill.

We have dealt with "it's the other guy's product" runarounds from the first day our first IBM PC-1 arrived in 1981, but never before had we gotten a runaround from Dell. In fact, on the few occasions that tech support had not been able to offer a fix, we simply waited until a new shift came on duty, called back and got a more experienced and capable employee. Off-shore tech support apparently has no freedom to veer from the prepared scripts. Bah humbug. If a script can provide the answers we need, just post them online and forego tech support altogether, but if you want loyal customers don't forget that quality counts far more than quantity!

Becky

^{2003 October 30, 10:00 AM}
Search Inside the Book: I have been buying books online for as long as books have been sold online, but Amazon has added a new wrinkle that might have put my book habit into overdrive. Now when you use the Amazon search you can actually search inside all of the books Amazon offers in its inventory. This may one day be a really cool tool, but for now it is mostly a gimmick as the search is very unsophisticated. Reminiscent of InfoSeek in 1995, a search returns so many results they are useless. There is no way to target results, say to search only in works of fiction for references to "realtor" in lower case without a trademark (which NAR's legal team would probably jump right on). That would be valuable. Displaying a list of 4,000 books that reference "real estate agent" is useless (note: if you don't use quotation marks 4000 references will increase to 40,000!).

Well, I'll use it, and probably benefit from the info to some extent, but I don't yet see a dramatic change in my book browsing. Barnes & Noble, get a clue!

Becky

^{2003 October 5, 11:45 PM}
Center of the Transaction: An Inman News online poll last week asked

Who should be at the center of the real estate transaction?

Real estate agent

Real estate broker

Lender

The house

Home buyer

Home seller

Online real estate company

Conflicts of interest abound in the real estate transaction, and more energy is spent trying to deny them than in trying to clarify, disclose, and/or resolve conflicts, such as:

• Appraisers concerned about future referrals from lenders or brokers
• Realtors® and Brokers representing both principals at once to protect and maximize commissions
• Inspectors afraid to jeopardize a closing so as to protect future employment
• Brokers buying their listings for themselves
• Sellers with undisclosed knowledge of defects
• Buyers with poor credit,
• etc.

It is not wrong to have a conflict of interest; it is only wrong to fail to disclose conflicts and to deny the principals the right to weigh the consequences of conflicts and the opportunity to make informed choices regarding the parties they hire to help them. This is not an issue to be decided by the paid professionals in the industry, but by the consumers who rely on professionals to aid and protect them.

Becky

^{2003 September 22, 05:30 PM}
Salam Pax Interview: I have been a reader of the "Baghdad Blogger," Salam Pax since before the war. Now, of course, he has become a media darling, and his blog is being published as a book. For the past few weeks he has been in London on a PR blitz apparently. You can hear him on NPR's FreshAir via RealAudio or MediaPlayer. His spoken English is even better than his written English, and all in all it is a fascinating interview even if you never read the blog.

Becky

^{2003 September 15, 04:27 AM}
Complaint about a Realtor®?: More and more often I get pleas from home buyers and sellers who want to know how to make a formal complaint about a real estate agent. Most of them cite specific instances of fraudulent or unethical practices, a few spew such anger we can't tell what the source of the complaint might be, but in every case these are consumers who have a voice and now have a means of finding out how to use it. In each case, I direct them to their state's Real Estate Department or Commission or whatever is the local licensing entity, and recommend they follow up with a letter to their local Board of Realtors®. Since the advent of "board of choice" options for Realtors® that is not easy to determine, but licensing is state-controlled. If you are a real estate consumer with a complaint check State Departments of Real Estate to find a link to your state's licensing agency.

Brokers and agents NB: Consumer ignorance cannot protect you from poor practices any more. Now is a good time to review your license manual(often online at your DRE's web site) as well as Realtor® Code of Ethics. It is not true that all real estate agents and brokers are *****s and *****s, but only once in 8+ years have we received a letter commending an agent as having done an outstanding job of meeting the consumer's needs...and we have received hundreds of complaints. Most of those consumers would probably have done nothing more than blow off steam to friends and family before the internet became an instant resource. My guess is that many do not follow up inquiries with actually filing complaints, but no doubt more do so now than in the recent, pre-internet, past.

^{05:00 PM}

It's time for competition in the cable markets...local choices, I mean. In a very short period of time we have become dependent on Comcast for both television and ISP access, and reliability is getting to be an ever-increasing problem. IRED has suffered a number of internet outages over the past two weeks. One outage lasted nearly 18 hours, and two others exceeded 3 hours each. Others have been under two hours, or have been erratic on-again/off-again marathons.

Theoretically we could revert to dial-up, but that means maintaining modems and superfluous phone lines, or reinstalling a DSL line for backup, neither of which is a viable alternative...or simply sending employees home and hoping the web site does not go bonkers in the mean-time...and of course delaying updates.

To add to the problem, we experience power outages almost every time it rains for years. Our saving grace may be that we are in Texas and rain is not a daily event! Yes, an alternative power company is now available, but considering they use the same infrastructure as the TU Electric I am hard pressed to believe Reliant can be any more reliable. If you have evidence to the contrary I'd like to hear from you.

Becky

^{2003 August 4, 06:45 AM}
Lithotripsy: Yes, I survived, and the gruesome kidney stone is no more. If you suffer the same agony and lithotripsy is an option, take it!

Outsourcing: On to more interesting topics, Simeon Mitropolitski presents an insider's view of the current hot topic, "outsourcing," entitled Low-cost Work force and How It Affects Real Estate. More often than not Simeon brings a unique perspective to a topic that Westerners seldom get to see.

What's New: IRED has a new columnist: Henry Springs of Chicago, IL, writes about the mortgage industry, property foreclosures and what the industry is doing to avoid the crises of the late 80s.

Becky

^{2003 June 29, 11:45 PM}
Lithotripsy: Well, it may not be exactly a trip, but it is supposed to put an end, temporarily at least, to the kidney stone that has been plaguing me for a while. In 24 hours, after a 30 minute treatment, they tell me the stone will be pulverized to sand and wash away quietly. I sure hope so since it has been anything but "quiet" for weeks!

Baghdad Bloggers: There are a couple of English version Iraqi Blogs that are worth following if you are interested in first hand accounts of post-Saddam life in Baghdad: Salam Pax has been blogging for a year or so and Ghaith Abdul for less than a month. Each also offers a PhotoLog: Salam or Ghaith.

CIPS: Bev A. asks how to find a (CIPS) Certified International Property Specialist designee to help her buy a house in Mexico. While the CIPS web site does not include a directory there is a searchable database. Enter the country (Mexico) and specialty (residential) and you'll get a list which includes the designee's languages and city/state/country or residence. From there you'll need to interview likely candidates to determine their actual credentials.

Becky

^{2003 June 24, 09:26 PM}
Without attribution: Have you ever stumbled across something you wrote on another web site...without attribution? Today it was Alice Held who found her well established "Holidays" column on another site. This is not the first time Alice's outstanding web site has been plagiarized, but it caught my attention partially because we carry Alice's column on IRED, with permission, and it was so clearly Alice's personality that there was no question of which came first, Alice's page or the copied version.

We've found the entire IRED directory copied to other sites as if it were original work. The key here is WORK! We spend hours every day seeking real estate related web sites, reviewing those sites and maintaining the links, as we have done since February, 1995. It ain't easy, my friend, and it sure is not free! For the first seven years we did not charge for links believing that we could make the site profitable through targeted advertising. That's a topic for another day, but eventually it became necessary to charge a listing fee simply to maintain quality control. When someone copies our work, posts it to another site and calls it a "directory" they have stolen not only our content, but our work product, our reputation and our revenue source.

The excuses we hear from such violators are almost laughable. "We thought you would be flattered," one French site declared. "It's just links, and links are free," another claimed.

What is the justification for stealing Alice Held's work, or Debbie Ferrari's work? A good web site, and there are relatively few good ones, is not only a source of objective, or even subjective, information, but an expression of the personality and character of the author. If you have to copy someone else's work I have to assume that you are lacking in one or both.

Becky

^{2003 June 22, 05:30 PM}
IRED: began by accident about 8 and a half years ago. It started mostly because I was, and am, opinionated and wanted to express my opinions.

Ironically, as the site grew into the monolith it is today, it lost most of the attitude and personality that I felt made it worth while. It also stopped being fun.

Fast forward to today. The web is no longer the anomaly it was in 1994-95, and I am no longer the voice of IRED. There are others who do the primary work of maintenance and even of editorializing. Blogging is in, and there is no shortage of opinions on the web -- whether about real estate or politics or gum-chewing, everyone has an equal opportunity to speak out and be heard. Meanwhile, I have spent so much time sending individual replies to email questions that I have failed in what was my primary objective; sharing information with anyone who cared enough to want alternative ideas. So, herewith, Becky Blogs!

This is where I will respond to some of the more interesting and more frequent questions I receive from all over the world. Some of the questions are funny enough to stand alone ("I'm looking for a condom in Florida," wrote a gentleman from Germany) and some are simply unanswerable (Why won't my Realtor return my calls?), but most do have a universal quality that deserves broader discussion than a single email reply and one person's opinion. Over time, if there is any interest, I may open this up to comments, but for now it will remain closed except for e-mail sent to becky at ired dot com.

Becky

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