In light of the recent Active Rain (AR) vs Move.com lawsuit, one of the compelling issues and hot button topics revolves around ‘Who owns the content…The business or the individual who wrote it?’

This seems trivial to me. If I write original content, then I own it and you must at least credit me for my words, plagiarism is criminal. Don’t expect everyone to follow the rules…take the time to protect your writings with a creative commons license, digitally fingerprint your stuff and sign up for Google-Alerts to police the web for perpetrators of content scraping.

Just for fun, let’s say Move.com (The NAR) did buy AR and ‘my content’; If NAR wants to publish my content on their social network (so long as they cite me appropriately) I’m 100% fine with that, although they may want to read what I write before doing so…No one will accuse me of being very NAR friendly. In any case, my content would have graduated to a larger stage, getting me (potentially) more notoriety, and a deeper readership base. Isn’t this what marketing and advertising is supposed to be about: Getting in front of as many eyeballs as possible?

The status-quo of real estate professionals still have a hard time wrapping their head around the notion that sharing information is a good thing, so I understand how foreign it must seem that wide, even uncontrolled distribution of their work can actually benefit them. It’s that Kool-Aid kicking in.

I post on AR to expand my potential audience reach, not to indulge my narcissistic needs. It’s the same reason I submit my posts on Real Estate Voices, why I put a huge RSS icon in my sidebar, offer up my posts to be conveniently delivered via email, and give anyone multiple ways to access, bookmark and otherwise distribute my writings for me. A couple of posts ago I mentioned how I cant find The XBroker via any traditional search queries (mortgage blog, mortgage opinion, et.al.) yet I have a pretty solid readership according to my sites traffic metrics. These desirable results are a product of an organic and viral process where a friend of a friend (FoaF) tells another friend about The XBroker.

I’ve had discussions with more than 10 Realtors who are all into learning about SEO, ‘Web 2.0′, new marketing ideas, etc. yet they still get upset at the notion of their ‘information’ appearing else ware or someone else properly publishing their work, critically or otherwise. This leads me to believe that there’s still an abundance of ignorance as to how/why/what the web in it’s present state can do for them and their business. If you plan to use the web in a marketing strategy, open discourse and communal sharing encapsulate the New Rules.

So keep writing, putting your idea’s, your business and yourself out there. Put your listings on Zillow, engage Trulia Voices, keep posting on AR and hope Google buys one or all of them. As a type of insurance, start your own blog-site (or other semantically natured web-presence) to preserve your content no matter what happens to anyone else. There will come a time in the not so distant future that the term ‘blog’ will fade into the description of a website. It’s a matter of time before the consumer nation discovers these lesser known networks and recognizes them as the authoritative voice.

Also See:

What Active Rain Should do Now