Following my post the other day on gross glasses at hotels, this is the second in probably a two-part series on travel challenges. This time the target is airport security, or the lack thereof, and the outrage we should be expressing about having to endure the hassle of inane security procedures that do nothing to protect us. I’m spurred into writing this post from a call to action in The Airport Security Follies on the Jet Lagged blog at the New York Times. After covering in detail the “irrational, wasteful and pointless” security policies for passenger screening, the article turns to the travelers:
In the end, I’m not sure which is more troubling, the inanity of the existing regulations, or the average American’s acceptance of them and willingness to be humiliated. These wasteful and tedious protocols have solidified into what appears to be indefinite policy, with little or no opposition. There ought to be a tide of protest rising up against this mania. Where is it? At its loudest, the voice of the traveling public is one of grumbled resignation. The op-ed pages are silent, the pundits have nothing meaningful to say.
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How we got to this point is an interesting study in reactionary politics, fear-mongering and a disconcerting willingness of the American public to accept almost anything in the name of “security.†Conned and frightened, our nation demands not actual security, but security spectacle. And although a reasonable percentage of passengers, along with most security experts, would concur such theater serves no useful purpose, there has been surprisingly little outrage. In that regard, maybe we’ve gotten exactly the system we deserve.
This is a call to action. We should not accept the idiotic policies being foisted upon us for no good reason. I’m sending a link to this post to my North Dakota Senators, and encourage you to do the same for your local representatives. I’m skeptical that anyone will listen, but it’s better than being silent. If you have other ideas as to how we can better express outrage and opposition to these policies, let me know.
P.S. Here’e the text of the e-mails I sent to Byron Dorgan and Kent Conrad, the North Dakota Senators:
Dear Senator Dorgan:
My name is Michael Wurzer and I am a North Dakota resident tired of being subjected to ridiculous policies at airports and am asking you to try to change the policies. The New York Times has a great opinion piece that summarizes the insanity we’re enduring and I recently posted about it on my blog as well, asking for others to participate in this call to action. Please let me know what you can do, and I’ll do what I can to promote your efforts.
Sincerely,
Michael
Michael Wurzer
President and CEO
FBS Data Systems — An Employee Owned Company
800.437.4232 x140 (office)
701.306.9341 (mobile)
www.flexmls.com/blog
The NY Times writes today about blogging in Blogging’s A Low-Cost, High-Return Marketing Tool. I won’t say the article is great but it’s a decent introduction to business blogging and its pros and cons. I definitely agree that blogging won’t work for every business. In fact, were it not for the controversies surrounding MLS these days, I wonder if the FBS Blog would be interesting at all.
I’ve been thinking lately that the FBS Blog has been more of a one-trick pony than I would like, so focused on real estate data standards and MLS regionalization to the exclusion of other possibly interesting topics. I really like the idea of developing conversations with our customers, but our experience with the FBS Blog so far is that those conversations don’t occur quite as easily out in the open. So, we’re working on developing support systems internally to our MLS to allow more private conversations within the MLS and among our users, which really will be an extension of blogging. This is a definite priority for us in 2008, because we fundamentally believe that customer service is the new marketing.
As the MLS industry embarks on a new year, re-focused on data standards and data sharing, we may be able to learn from similar phenomenon in related industries.
Last week, I read a post by Alex Russell called The W3C Can’t Save Us. The post deals with web browser (HTML, CSS, etc.) standards and how they seem stuck and lacking innovation, but the ideas are instructive to those of us in real estate, too:
It’s clear then that vendors in the market are the ones who deploy new technologies which improve the situation. The W3C has the authority to standardize things, but vendors have all the power when it comes to actually making those things available. Ten years ago, we counted on vendors introducing new and awesome things into the wild and then we yelled at them to go standardize. It mostly worked. Today, we yell at the standards bodies to introduce new and awesome things and yell at the browser vendors to implement them, regardless of how unrealistic they may be. It doesn’t work. See the problem?
Applying this to the MLS industry, we may be seeing the same thing, only earlier in the process. Brokers and agents are yelling at MLSs today to standardize and the inflection point I see here is whether, ten years from now, brokers and agents will be yelling at the standards bodies to “introduce new and awesome things” because innovation will have stagnated as the newly centralized databases restrict access to the “standard” approaches that necessarily have limits.
How can we build the standards process and large central repositories so they encourage instead of limit innovation? That’s a central question facing our industry now, and one answer may be in Mr. Russell’s post itself, where he states: “To get a better future, not only do we need a return to ‘the browser wars’, we need to applaud and use the hell out of ‘non-standard’ features until such time as there’s a standard to cover equivalent functionality. Non-standard features are the future, and suggesting that they are somehow ‘bad’ is to work against your own self-interest.”
More instructive thoughts come from Tim O’Reilly in When Markets Collide from his Release 2.0 series (PDF), in which he analyzes how Wall Street’s use of technology may be predictive for Web 2.0’s use of technology, and vice versa. In that paper, O’Reilly states:
Web 2.0 may have begun with decentralization and peer-to-peer architectures, but if Wall Street and Google are guides, it will end with massive, centralized data centers extracting every last drop of performance. This trend is already apparent with the rise of applications based on massive data centers, where everything from performance and scalability to cost advantages will mean that, as Debra Chrapaty, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of global foundation services, once remarked, ‘In the future, being a developer on someone’s platform will mean being hosted on their infrastructure.’
We can already see this same centralization trend happening now in the MLS industry, with the ultimate centralization being proposed by the NAR with its Gateway concept. As Mr. O’Reilly points out, there are advantages to centralization, but there are disadvantages, too. If creation of large repositories (or a repository) is beneficial or inevitable, then it makes sense to pause a moment during the creation to ask how we can protect against calcifying bureaucracy and power resulting from the centralization. These two issues together — standards and centralization — could easily become more of a nightmare than a solution if some forethought isn’t given to ensuring that we’re building a platform for innovation instead of against it.
That power comes from data is again reiterated by Tim O’Reilly in his recent article Google Admits Data is the Intel Inside, which notes that Google is building and acquiring so many disparate applications (mapping, Goog-411, video, etc.) so that they have the data available for building better search. In other words, they have no (or little) intent on making money from these other applications, their objective is to build a bigger, better (proprietary) data store they can leverage to make more money. Back to the “When Markets Collide” paper:
More thought-provoking is the trend of Google and Yahoo to provide more direct results for many common types of data. If the financial markets are any guide, we will see search engines providing direct access to many more data types over time, with search engines increasingly competing with their former customers to be the preferred target for a given search. Beware of relying on a search giant’s API for the existence of your business. . . .
In this insight, we see a controversial but defensible projection in which Web 2.0, born in a vision of openness and sharing, will end with private data pools controlled by large companies and used disproportionately for their own benefit. Network effects driven by user participation lead to increasing returns in the size and value of the databases that are created as a result. As the Web 2.0 platform matures, we expect to see more companies capitalizing on these insights. Information may want to be free, but valuable information, it seems, is, as always, still being hoarded.
So who is going to win and lose in this emerging environment of data sharing and pooling, which will produce consolidation, control and power? As MLSs participate in these initiatives, are they recognizing the transfer of power that’s occurring? Are they getting fair value in return? Will the MLS platforms and standards being built today encourage or inhibit innovation, which only occurs through competition?
So that this post does more than just ask questions, let me suggest that one way to encourage innovation is the distributed repository idea I posed in Regionals, Part II. The idea is that MLSs or others contributing data to the repository should have a mutual right of withdrawing data from the repository, essentially creating the possibility for many regionals or repositories that would then be able to compete with each other, which competition necessarily will produce innovation.
At long last, the NAR’s Gateway concept is out in the open for discussion. I’ve been asking about more details for some time and want to thank Jim Duncan for making it happen.
Here are some of my initial observations on the PAG Report on the Gateway (PDF):
The idea that all the data can be stored in a single repository is flawed. It will never happen, because there will always be some agent somewhere who wants to differentiate their service and they’ll start collecting data outside the repository. That’s what innovation and competition does, it differentiates.
Perhaps hearing my plea for pro-competitive approaches to regionalization, the PAG report lists as one of its “principles and characteristics” that, “The Gateway is organic so it can evolve as industry needs change.” What does that mean exactly? Seems like a throw-away line meant to appease but it certainly doesn’t appease me
Thanks to Dustin for pointing out how FeedBurner offers e-mail updates, which I’ve now added to the FBS Blog. Also, thanks to Paul Stusiak for pointing out that my Atom feed link in the side panel was broken; I’ve fixed that now, too. So, hopefully we’re providing a few more ways for people to stay up to date with the FBS Blog.
Centralization is a bug · Bill Joy: “Wherever you work, most of the smart people are somewhere else.â€
The reason the Web worked so well is that nobody had to ask anybody’s permission to build a browser or a crawler or a search engine or an auction site or a dating service. Anything in the system that requires central authority, that’s something that holds you back.
This is from Tim Bray, in a blog post called “Message from the Web” following an address he gave to a group of accountants and others working on XBRL, the XML standard for business reporting.
These seem like words the real estate community should heed as the MLS is transformed over the coming years. Make no mistake, the MLS is being transformed, and the decisions for that transformation are being made right now.
Last Friday, I posted about the discussions beginning in Minnesota to share data among all the MLSs in the State. My reading of the group was that the inclination was to create a central repository of the data, to which all the MLSs would contribute. Whether or not to centralize, however, did not seem to be a big question, and yet it’s one I think needs to be asked and discussed much more.
There certainly are benefits to centralization. Although in my earlier post I say in the video that monopolies are not efficient, I really should have been more specific and said they are not efficient at innovating. Certain monopolies are more efficient, like the power company, because of the huge infrastructure that can’t easily be duplicated.
Is this also true in the MLS world? Not likely. First, there already is a distributed model in place, and the inefficiency from it is in the lack of standards, not the distribution. In fact, I think a strong case can be made that more or greater distribution is actually the best answer for the MLS industry. Just last week, there was a ton of blogging press about the upset at Point2, a company that provides syndication services and a so-called National Listing Service. One of the benefits of Point2 is that it gives brokers control over where their listings are advertised. This model has a great deal of appeal but what it lacks is the benefit of the aggregation the MLS structure provides. I’ve written before that the true value of the MLS has nothing to do with technology but rather is the agreement to aggregate data fostered by the cooperative model of the MLS. Among such fierce competitors as real estate brokers and agents, this cooperation is nothing short of miraculous and, for that, some centralization is required.
Yet what the quote above reminds us is that the success of the web is due to a lack of centralization. The success of the web is the massive innovation fostered by a simple standard, and such innovation is not likely in a centralized environment. The monster question for the real estate industry today is whether centralized data management is the only way to standardize the data or whether a simple focus on standards like RETS will be enough to move the industry into a period of massive innovation.
Snapped a couple of pictures with my Treo 700p of a beautiful frosty day on our way home from St. Cloud today.
Sometimes it’s tough living here in the tundra, but today wasn’t such a day.
Some agents view the MLS system simply as an advertising medium, and enter the listing data accordingly. They complain about all the required fields and even go so far as to try to put the property in the wrong area simply because another area is more frequently searched. They’ll also put their contact information and other branding in the remarks and manipulate the address to confuse listing history and days on market. The tricks are legion but short-sighted.
The irony is that those who trick the system or give data completeness and accuracy short-shrift because they think it’s just an advertising mechanism also need to use the system to search and expect it to be accurate. If a listing is contingent, those searching the system deserve to know that. If an agent is searching the MLS for a specific area, they do not expect to see listings from other areas. Liability can hinge on accurate address and tax and other information. “Deemed reliable” should not just be words at the bottom of the listing print out.
Even for those focused on using the system to promote their listing at every level, data accuracy and depth should be critical. Searching fundamentally depends on accurate data. The more details you provide regarding the property, the more likely it will be to match someone’s search when they are looking for just that special characteristic. Instead of putting your contact information in the remarks, using that space for valuable descriptive text might result in more search terms matching your listing or a buyer being attracted to your listing from your description. Data accuracy isn’t just the right thing to do, it’s the smart thing.
On December 11, 2007, I gave a presentation to a group of Association and MLS executives as well as brokers and agents in Minnesota, who are exploring data sharing among MLSs in Minnesota. Below is a video re-enactment of my presentation.
(If the embedding doesn’t work, you can view the video here.)
Also presenting to the Minnesota group were Art Carter from CA-RETS, Gregg Larson from Clareity Consulting and Security, David Charron from MRIS, and Ed Newman of RMLS-MN (Northstar) standing in for Rob Overman from FNRES who wasn’t able to make it because of ice storms. Art Carter discussed the political and technical processes the many MLSs from Southern California are going through as they ramp up the new CARETS system, which is an example of the repository approach. David Charron also talked about the repository approach being pursued in Wisconsin (WIREX), on the east coast, and elsewhere with their Cornerstone system.
All the perspectives from these presenters were very valuable for the group in Minnesota and we had some great conversations afterward as well. The MLSs in Minnesota are trying to solve some serious challenges and it’s heartening to see RETS at the center of the many solutions being offered. There is no doubt that broad and deep data standards are the key to moving the MLS industry forward in a competitive environment, as opposed to forcing MLSs through painful mergers and into data silos that will inevitably frustrate innovation.
