The Carnival Challenge

In a challenge to the real estate blogging community, Greg Swann, host of the 13th Edition of The Carnival of Real Estate dared future hosts to demand the best from entrants. In an unprecedented move he suggested poor writing or worse, plagiarized text warranted no serious consideration in what should be "a celebration of weblogging excellence."

Taking up the cause in this week's contest, Inman Blog challenged "our industry bloggers to write consistently compelling copy," and limited exposure to the ten top posts in a week in which he stated there were "a ton of good submissions." His criteria for the competition was the ability to find "a compelling subject appealing to a wide audience, clarity of writing" and in some cases reader discussion. The top three blogs honored this week were Greg's discussion of Buyer Brokerage, Mike Simonsen of Altos Research and his observations of Yahoo Losing Online Real Estate Market Share and The Matrix (Jonathan Miller's) thoughtful piece on The Law of Thirds.

With the competition heating up from week to week and entries increasing exponentially, the gauntlet has indeed been thrown down. If you want to compete in this arena, your post had better be well thought out, irresistibly written and original, because in this venue good just isn't good enough.