tigho is forcery, nyc, real estate, advertising, tech

Illustration by The New York Times; Photograph by Getty Images

Google appears to be testing display ads in Gmail. I discovered the following image ad in my own Gmail account this morning, and Google has since confirmed a test.

Image ads have made their way into paid search on Google.com and various other properties on Google. But this was really jarring for me to encounter. It’s the only such ad I saw (next to an email from a clothing retailer in my inbox) after purposely looking for others.

I’m sure it’s a test to see how users react and what the response rates are. Gmail is formally a part of the “Google Display Network“:

Your text, image, rich media, and video ads can appear across YouTube, Google properties such as Google Finance, Gmail, Google Maps, Blogger, as well as over one million Web, video, gaming, and mobile display partners.

I’m not sure how long this test has been running; it’s the first time I’ve seen it and I use Gmail as my primary email address.

Postscript: A Google spokesperson provided the following comment:

We’re always trying out new ad formats and placements in Gmail, and we  recently started experimenting with image ads on messages with heavy image content.

 

After more than two decades of effort, Chinatown is moving closer to forming a business improvement district that would charge area property owners for added services.

The Department of City Planning is now reviewing the plan, which must be approved by the department's board of commissioners and then the City Councill. The measure so far has overcome early opposition; two previous efforts to create a district were defeated.

"It's a historic moment for Chinatown," City Council member Margaret Chin said speaking in favor of the proposal during a public hearing on Wednesday.

Yardi, a software provider for the multi-family industry has launched a rental website for renters to find apartments nationally. The new service is called RentCafe and says renters can “search apartment listings, compare and apply to your favorite apartment communities, and pay your rent online, all from RENTCafé. We’re saving you time while making apartment renting easier.”

For apartment advertisers, the service seems to be a freemium model where apartments can post for free and then pay on a per lease basis but it is rather unclear from the website.

At first glance it looks like a majority of the listings are populated by ForRent.com. The user interface is very clean and it has a mynewplace like map on the left hand side.

Traffic to the site seems to be very low according to compete.com. Compete has unique visitors for October at around 1,000 and then goes to nothing for Dec.

Journalists are coping with the rising information flood by borrowing data visualization techniques from computer scientists, researchers and artists. Some newsrooms are already beginning to retool their staffs and systems to prepare for a future in which data becomes a medium. But how do we communicate with data, how can traditional narratives be fused with sophisticated, interactive information displays?

Watch the full version with annotations and links at datajournalism.stanford.edu.

Produced during a 2009-2010 John S. Knight Journalism Fellowship at Stanford University.

Oodle has had its sight set of leveraging the power of social networks to facilitate classified marketplace transactions for some time now. Here’s a short video clip from June 2010 positioning Oodle as a Social Classifieds provider for rental properties:

As the video explains, Oodle also powers Facebook Marketplace. Recently, Oodle announced that they had extended their reach on Facebook Marketplace by providing new features that further leverage the power of Facebook’s social graph, as explained in this TechCrunch article.

In addition, Oodle has recently acquired a social networking service through acquisition of Grouply with an eye towards moving the Social Graph beyond (just) friends. Facebook in turn has acquired Yardsellr – a social buying and selling platform – which TechCrunch describes as “an eBay for Facebook, except without the auctions”.

TechCrunch also had a blog post from November 2010 titled Will the Real “eBay of Social” Please Stand Up?, where they interviewed Oodle CEO Craig Donato about the emerging Social Marketplaces category. This video can be viewed below:

The Social Marketplaces space is really just a segment of the broader Social Commerce space. Look for a lot of innovation – and the consequent winners and losers – in these areas in 2011.

If you’re having trouble settling on a realistic price with sellers before their listing goes online, ask them to consider this: two popular real estate websites have now found that a property’s first week online can make or break the sale.

Online brokerage redfin.com, currently 15th on the Hitwise list of US real estate websites, was the first to come out with this finding, noting that more than half of all listings activated in 2009 failed to sell by August 2010.

“The week that a listing goes on the market, we estimate that it gets nearly four times more visits on real estate websites than it does a month later, which is the earliest that most sellers will consider a price reduction,” redfin.com writes.

redfin.com’s statistics on listing views show a steady decline after the first week, with small spikes in traffic seen after 30 and 60 days, when bargain hunters start scouring the website.

New Zealand market leader realestate.co.nz has a similar story to tell. Its statistics show that a quarter of listing views during a property’s first two months online take place in the first seven days. realestate.co.nz argues that this should prompt agents to include a strong lead photo, plenty of good back-up photos, great listing copy, and a realistic price in the first version of their listing.

“Get these four essentials right and you are ensuring that your property has the greatest chance of grabbing that viewing audience. Get it wrong or decide to change some details after a week and you could already have missed the boat,” realestate.co.nz says.

 

The Enlightenment faith in scientific lucidity bites itself back again, as psychological experiments suggest that we learn more from harder-to-read texts. Could opacity be the new transparency?