Disqus - Latest Comments for Matt Heaton

Re: Happy New Year!

Matt Heaton — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 15:31:58 -0000

Congrats Ardell, your ass is now famous :)

Re: Active Rain Website Down

Matt Heaton — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 13:44:05 -0000

Yeah, that was one scary day, maybe it had something to do with Halloween fast approaching. Multiple hard drive failures on our database server at the same time (maybe a power surge or something). We have a RAID array (redundant drives) but when several fail at once you're in trouble.

Not knowing how much data was lost until the data center retreived our backups from tape. Then realizing image files weren't in the backup set, and waiting for our data center to try and boot the failed drives to recover data. Trust me I almost had a heart attack several times during the day.

In the end we only lost about 1 hour worth of data in the middle of the night but that sure ruined our weekend.

First hardware failure we've had in 2 1/2 years with the datacenter.

Re: More Texas Hold’em With Freddie

Matt Heaton — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 18:26:20 -0000

$10B is a drop in the bucket compared to the capital they'll need over the next couple years. Why anyone would buy their stock given the unbelievably massive dilution that is going to take place is beyond me.

Re: REBlogWorld, Be Part of The Worlds Largest New Media Expo

Matt Heaton — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 22:14:59 -0000

Obviously I don't suck :)

Re: Active Rain Website Down

Matt Heaton — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 13:44:05 -0000

Re: Happy New Year!

Matt Heaton — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 15:31:58 -0000

Congrats Ardell, your ass is now famous :)

Re: Ahead of my time, Real Estate blogging wise

Matt Heaton — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 12:35:15 -0000

While the real estate industry has been slower to adopt blogging and technology in general than most, I see it starting to pick up steam. Over at ActiveRain we have a community blogging platform that's picked up about 17k members (ok only about 3k have actively blogged) in the last 8 months.

Blogging has shown itself to be a particularly effective marketing tool in real estate. There are a large number of (very successful) agents, who's blog is their primary business generator. I think the reason is it's effective is that consumers have been bombarded with advertising, spam and lead aggregation companies. A blog tends to help the agent generate trust in a low pressure environment while the consumer can maintain their anonymity.

Re: The ActiveRain Real Estate “Social Network”

Matt Heaton — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 00:50:39 -0000

I'm glad you and other agents are finding the ActiveRain Real Estate Network to be a good tool. We launched the site less than a month ago and we've gotten a great response so far. There are 288 profiles so far and growth is on an exponential curve. Like you said we are rolling out new features continuously. The current site is just a skeleton of what will be there in a few months. There will be lots of blogging, groups, forums and other communication tools for real estate professionals. But most of what we do will be driven by the response we get from our members, what they need and ask for.

Yes, we will be adding support for our friends up north soon.

We've already had a couple agents report that they're showing houses based off of consumers who have contacted them through the site, even though we haven't done anything to specifically target consumers. It just proves if you provide useful information on your profile, search engines will find it and so will the public. Because we are building a large network we have a lot more authority with the search engines than a bunch of individual sites. Maybe we can knock some of those unnamed lead generation companies which clutter to top of the rankings down a few notches and be able to pass the traffic directly onto the members of our network instead.

"Grow your Network"

Re: I Need Technorati Help!

Matt Heaton — Sun, 17 Sep 2006 01:47:19 -0000

Yeah, I think technorati has been overwelmed for some time.

We still can't get them to index the posts on ActiveRain, most of the other blog search engines have. I've been emailing back and forth with their support for the last three months, no luck so far.

I was just able to get to the point where I could claim my blog on the site yesterday and it indexed the posts, but doesn't look like it's updating.

Re: The First Carnival of ActiveRain!

Matt Heaton — Sun, 05 Nov 2006 00:12:36 -0000

Jay, thanks again for all your hard work you put into helping put this together. The Carnival of ActiveRain was simply awesome.

Re: Foreclosure Looms for “Extreme Makeover” Home

Matt Heaton — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 20:12:48 -0000

Ok, that's one of those stories that just makes you want to bang your head against the wall. I can see why the people that put in the hard work might be a little tick'd