Live Video Streams on RCG? With Facebook Chat?

I’ve been told my interest in using Facebook for marketing is a bit unhealthy, but I’ve been having so much fun, and this week I pushed the limits in some ways that I thought I’d share in the hope we could spark some interesting conversations…

275x229First off, I’ve been really fortunate to work with the team behind a really interesting movie called The Stoning of Soraya M. that’s being released in selected theaters today (and Seattle on July 17th). It’s a controversial movie based on the true story of a woman who was stoned to death in the Iran after being accused of adultly adultery by her husband. To help with outreach for the movie, I built (with some ridiculously well-timed help from Loren Nason of the Future of Real Estate Technology) a Facebook app that let me combine both a live video stream with a streaming facebook chat-style app. The result was an interview with the director where we took questions from the Facebook community. You can see a recording of the video on the Spinnio app page where we hosted the conversation.

However, before I was ready to go live with the app for the movie, I decided to use the Spinnio app to record a weekly radio show that I run with Rob Hahn called the RE:RnD (Real Estate Radio with Rob and Dustin)… Normally, Rob and I record our radio show form opposite sides of the country, but this week, we were both in Orange County for REBCOC. We took advantage of some of the great real estate people in attendance to interview:

You can watch the video here:

But wait, there’s more!!!

seattle-channelI happen to think the technology of streaming video with Facebook Chat is simply too interesting to resist… so I created a page on RCG that combines the live stream from the Seattle Channel with a chat box that lets you comment on the video with anyone else on RCG watching the video. While I doubt this page will get the critical mass to be extremely interesting, hopefully you can see how cool it could be and just where the Facebook chat/status update technology is heading.

Also, I’m somewhat hesitant to throw a generic chat on RCG in a prominent place, but what do you think?

FB.init(“639647c0b027e22dfc546244ab17a875”, “files/xd_receiver.htm”);

(By the way, this works! Feel free to try it out, although be prepared that each comment leaves a “status” update on your profile.)

I’ve never liked the idea of adding a message board because I simply don’t have the time to moderate it, but I have a feeling that this would be pretty self-moderating considering it’s tied to people’s Facebook account… But what do you think? Should I create a place on RCG where you can leave comments and engage in conversations that aren’t tied to any blog post?

Raining Updates: Ads on RCG, Contributing Update, Footer Candy, New Feed, Email Tools, the HUGE list of RCG plugins and more!

There are so many updates to give, I decided to record a video to describe them all:

In the video, I talk about a number of changes and updates I’ve made to RCG recently including:

  • Rain Drop Ads on RCG… and if you’re one of the first five who signs up, then I’m willing to offer you a particularly good deal!
  • New page on how to get involved in becoming a contributor to RCG
  • Update to the theme by putting the active contributor information at the footer
  • Added MyBlogLog widget to the footer (as well as a few buttons)
  • Switched the main RCG feed over to Feedburner
  • Made it easier to email articles to others. Look for the “Email this Post” prompt at the bottom of every post
  • Speaking of email, you can know subscribe to RCG by email
  • Cleaned up the categories and hopefully made them more useful

And finally, because I haven’t done this in a while, I thought I’d list out all the plugins I’m currently using on Rain City Guide.

Plugin Description
Akismet Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. By Matt Mullenweg.
All in One SEO Pack Out-of-the-box SEO for your WordPress blog. By Michael Torbert.
Exclude Pages from Navigation Provides a checkbox on the editing page which you can check to exclude pages from the primary navigation. By Simon Wheatley.
FeedBurner FeedSmith Originally authored by Steve Smith, this plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber. By FeedBurner.
Get Recent Comments Display the most recent comments or trackbacks with your own formatting in the sidebar. By Krischan Jodies.
Google XML Sitemaps This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO. By Arne Brachhold.
Maintenance Mode Adds a splash page to your blog that lets visitors know your blog is down for maintenance. By Michael Wöhrer.
Photopress Photopress adds some image handling tools to WordPress, including a popup upload and browse tool, a random image template function, and a simple album. By Isaac Wedin.
Post-Plugin Library Does nothing by itself but supplies common code for the Similar Posts, Recent Posts, Random Posts, and Recent Comments plugins.  By Rob Marsh, SJ.
Register Plus WordPress 2.5+ ONLY. Enhance your Registration Page. Add Custom Logo, Password Field, Invitation Codes, Disclaimer, Captcha Validation, Email Validation, User Moderation, Profile Fields and more. By Skullbit.
RSS Footer Allows you to add a line of content to the end of your RSS feed articles. By Joost de Valk.
Seesmic Enables Seesmic video in wordpress. By Seesmic Inc.
Similar Posts Displays a highly configurable list of related posts. By Rob Marsh, SJ.
Subscribe To Comments Allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry.  By Mark Jaquith.
WordPress.com Stats Tracks views, post/page views, referrers, and clicks. Requires a WordPress.com API key. By Andy Skelton.
WordPress Database Backup On-demand backup of your WordPress database.  By Austin Matzko.
wp-cache Very fast cache module. By Ricardo Galli Granada.
WP-EMail Allows people to recommand/send your WordPress blog’s post/page to a friend. By Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan.
WP Ajax Edit Comments Allows users and admin to edit their comments inline. Admin and editors can edit all comments. By Ronald Huereca.
WP Status Notifier Sends email notification of posts pending review. By iDope.

With the exception of just one plugin that will remain nameless for now, that’s the full list. If you have any questions about why or how I use any of the plugins, feel free to ask away!

UPDATE:

  • I JUST realized I also forgot to mention the “new” RCG search box.    I added a Google custom search box that searches not just RCG, but contributor websites and blogs as well.   It’s pretty slick and I was even able to integrate it with the site so that the search shows up on right on the page.

Some SEO changes

Back at the Blog Business Summit, I asked Dave Taylor what I could do to improve my ranking in some of the “other” search engines… It seems that over 90% of RCG search engine traffic comes from Google and while I appreciate the traffic from Google, I would like a little love from the other search engines as well…

[photopress:seo.jpg,full,centered]

Dave’s advice was simple, and since the changes are not default in WordPress, I thought I’d pass them along to others…

1) I flipped the Blog Name and the Post Title around… The title (way up above the address bar!) for this post is “Some SEO changes by Seattle’s Rain City Real Estate Guide”. Before I made the change, the title would have been: “Seattle’s Rain City Real Estate Guide >> Some SEO changes.”

2) I added meta keywords and meta descriptions. To figure out good keywords, I did a few common real estate searches on Google AND Yahoo and then stole (borrowed heavily) from the sites that scored well… Here are the meta tags I ended up adding:

  • Keywords: Seattle Real Estate, real estate blog, real estate guide, Seattle real estate blog, Ballard, buying, selling, research, neighborhoods, Seattle neighborhoods
  • Description:Seattle Real Estate Blog, Seattle Washington’s complete website for real estate, homes for sale and virtual tours. Search for Seattle Real Estate neighborhood information.

(You can see the implementation by “right-clicking” on this page and selecting “view page source”… Also of note: all of these changes were made directly to the header.php file.)

I’ll give it a month and let you know if these simple changes have any affect on the other search engines!