Some would say that low barriers to entry encourage people to enter the real estate business who can't or won't learn the basics and legal things necessary to properly represent clients. Well, there's a judge in Philadelphia who is in our business, so legalities shouldn't be a problem, or...

The only problem is that this judge has been running his real estate business out of his legal chambers for years, using his legal secretary to collect rents, handle correspondence, and represent him in landlord-tenant court. I wonder how many times the court thing has been necessary?

I've written before about the "noise" on Twitter. I don't follow that many people on any one of my accounts, simply because I actually only want to follow people whose material I want to read. Following hundreds would kill any ability to actually pay attention to what they're saying. And, even if someone has content I like, if they tweet 20 or more times every day, I'll usually unfollow, as it dilutes my ability to keep up.

With the advent of lists on Twitter, there has been a lot of fanfare. However, I follow no lists, as they just aggregate someone else's noise into one follow in many cases. I just checked my account at http://twitter.com/jimkimmons, and looked at the 11 lists on which I've been placed.

Ten of the lists averaged only 11 followers each, with two having none. The largest follower list of that ten had 39 people following the list. Kudos to Pat Kitano, as his list stood far apart from that group, with more than 100 followers. But, that list follows almost 500 people. I just couldn't bring myself to follow that many people's tweets. It's just too much noise. As with Twitter itself, and other relatively new social networks, we'll be seeing changes and developments for a while. I just don't think I've seen a value in lists when I can create searches to bring out the "content" I want, no matter who tweeted it. I do, of course, follow Pat though.

Citigroup has announced that the lender will suspend foreclosure evictions and foreclosure notices for thirty days during the holidays. Between December 18 and January 17, approximately 4000 Citigroup customers in mortgage trouble will be left alone.

Actually, it's a nice thing to do. But, the new year will get off to a back-to-normal start for these 4000 families come mid-January. I would appreciate the postponement of action for the season if I were one of the group, but I'm not sure how much more "merry" it would make the holiday. Citigroup says that their Homeowner Assistance Program has helped 715,000 to avoid foreclosure since 2007.

I believe "content is king" for ultimate SEO power, but content isn't just text anymore. With Google and other search engines indexing the content of images and video now, your site should have some of all of it. But, forgetting search engines for now, it's all about providing the type of content today's web searchers and real estate buyers and sellers want. They want photos and video of an area, especially if they're moving there from somewhere else. They want to orient themselves, so mapping your images is a plus and makes your site more valuable to them.

I just spent a couple of weeks trying out a number of different software and online solutions for sharing photos, geotagging them, and mapping photo locations for embedding on websites. Take advantage of that research with my list of resources for geotagging photos and mapping on the Web. It fits into my plan of providing today's solutions that are free or cost very little, yet bring results to your marketing efforts.