Zoomf Blog - UK Property Blog.

Yay! The powers that be have finally decided that we won’t all wither and die if Google Street View is allowed to take pics of our streets. Photo-mapping is set to be a big part of our future, especially in the online property space. Google will be obscuring people’s faces where they are captured in shot, which satisfies the Information Commissioner’s request for people to remain ’safe and private’. Because, let’s face it, being in the background shot of a photo map could lead to…erm what exactly? As The Guardian quite rightly points out…

“Google Street View is as much a threat to western civilisation as disposable cameras are to London’s historic monuments. The most viewed pictures on the US version of Street View include a giant pumpkin, two men leering at a woman bending over and the fractured signboard over a porn theatre.”

Prepare to see the Google car driving down a street near you soon.

There’s a new place to search for property online, at least in the US anyway. Oodle are now proudly powering a new classifieds section on MySpace. The new and improved listings section is aimed to be more social than your average classifieds experience, with users being able to post listings for free that then link back to their MySpace profiles. Users can take advantage of MySpace blogs and bulletins to then promote their listings to their friends or allow other users to search for their listings naturally.

As well as the listings that MySpace users post themselves, users will have access to all the ads posted across the Oodle network, which currently gets around half a million new listings a day. At the moment, less than 1% of MySpace users actually look at the classifieds section, but with the right promotion this could be an interesting rival to the likes of Gumtree and Craigslist.

After all my whining that I wasn’t at Connect yesterday, I almost felt as though I was there thanks to the marvels of Twitter. Anyone that also wants to stay on top of the action should track the tag ‘#icsf‘ over at Summize, that way you won’t miss a tweet.

Zillow’s Drew Meyers has already written up a great post summarizing what went down at one of the morning panel sessions yesterday, the best gem to come from it seems to be from Linda Davis who (quite rightly) chimed…

“If you have a crappy business, a blog isn’t going to help.”

And whilst everyone is playing with real estate trading cards and getting excited about blogging at Connect, Trulia seem to be releasing their very own blogging platform. As reported by our gorgeous friends at AgentGenius, Trulia are (very quietly at this point) releasing their own blogging platform for agents that’s not a million miles away from what we’re used to seeing at ActiveRain. Is this going to crazily shake things up over in the US? We’ll have to wait and see. The usual concerns surrounding SEO and ownership of content are being aired in the comments sections of various posts covering the story but one thing is for sure, Trulia’s got consumer traffic…and tonnes of it.

This video is fantastic, it’s five minutes long and explains easily and succinctly how Google Analytics can help your property site. You NEED to be tracking your analytics if you have a property site, that way you can confidently answer questions like…

• How do people find you?
• Which sites are sending you the leads?
• What part of the world are your visitors in?
• What pages hold their attention?
• Which properties are getting the most hits?
• What browsers are your visitors using?
• Are your visitors converting into leads?

Big up to Trulia for putting the vid together.

p.s

If you’re getting this post via email, then you’ll need to click thru to the post to see the video…do it, it’s worth it!