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We want you to help us create a better Inman News.

Fill out our brief reader survey and tell us what we're doing right, doing wrong and what we can do better. We're looking for suggestions on what types of content you love to read and watch and what we need to be doing more of.

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Thanks in advance for your help!

Last week, Inman member Stefan Swanepoel held the opening ceremonies for the first Real Estate Olympics in the Inman Community.  This week, the nominations are in, and the medals are set to be given for, "Real Estate Pacesetter 2008."  There are 8 finalists in the medal round, and your votes are needed to determine the winner.  Here are the finalists:

1) Obeo

2) Roost

3) Condo Domain

4) Agent Sheild

5) Goomzee

6) eShowings

7) Bug Realty

8) Beat You There

All you have to do is go to the Real Estate Olympics post in the Community section, and vote for your choices for the gold, silver, and bronze medals.  The medalists will be announced after the voting closes on Friday.  Show your support for these industry pacesetters, and go vote!

(Photo Credit:  MICHAEL KAPPELER/AFP/Getty Images)

One of the great things about the members of the Inman Community is that they are very creative folks.  They are always offering great insight and input, and coming up with all sorts of creative ideas.  The latest of which has come from Stefan Swanepoel.  

Stefan has started a very interesting thread in the Real Estate Trends group that coincides with the XXIX Olympiad.  He has proposed a Real Estate Olympics in order to determine the "Real Estate Pacesetter 2008."  According to the post, here is how it works:  

"This week, till Friday 6PM Pacific, the Trends Community Blog will accept nominations of Companies that you consider to be one of the industry premier Pacesetters in our industry. Companies that are creating and leading our industry towards change.

Then over the coming weekend I will select among all the nominations the Top 8 finalists that will be posted next Monday the 18th. Next week all members of the Inman Trends Community will each have one vote to help determine which three companies are our medal winners for the title: Real Estate Pacesetter 2008."

So there you have it.  The first Real Estate Olympics are being held right here at Inman.com.  Now is your chance to nominate the companies that you think are leading the industry.  Head on over to the group in the Community section, and make your nominations.  There are already some coming in, so don't miss out.  Then, check back next week so you can vote.

The new Inman.com got a little bit of a facelift over the weekend; fixing bugs, adding some new features and tweaking others. We've spent a lot of time over the last few months listening to your feedback and have tried hard to incorporate as many of the suggestions as we could, in order to make your daily visits more enjoyable.

Here's just some of the things we included in this release:

New Home page - We designed the revamped home page with one thing in mind... creating a single destination where you can quickly scan all the activity on Inman.com. The home page now brings you all the news stories, videos, blog posts and opinion articles all into one central location. A quick glance over the page should be all you need to get up to speed and then point you in the right direction to read/watch the rest of the news.

New Navigation - We've condensed our top navigation bar to eliminate redundant entries and focus on the key elements of Inman.com. Links that disappeared (News, Blog, Opinion, etc.) can now be accessed from the home page through the View More... links in their respective sections. 

Special Reports - Premium Members of Inman.com now have much easier access to our award-winning industry special reports - right from the home page. Log in to your Member account and you'll find the links right there waiting for you. These premium PDF downloads go deep into specific topic areas and are beautifully formatted and ready for you to print.

Columnists - Our columnists write fantastic, engaging content - so it stands to reason they should have a unique spot on our home page. So we built a new view to dynamically pull the most recent articles from our Columnists. So now, if you're looking for Marc Davison's latest piece or Lou Barnes' latest column, for example - just head to the home page and you'll find them right there. 

Video - We've built out a brand new video section on Inman.com that includes our popular InmanTV video shorts and that now, most excitingly, includes all of the videos from our past Real Estate Connect events. Only Premium Members have access to Connect videos though, so upgrade today and start watching!

Store - Many people have been asking us how they can buy our consumer news Columnists' special reports. So we built a whole new storefront that pulls together these reports for one-click purchase. We also built a view on the home page that highlights the most recent report. Stop on by the store and see what we have to offer... we plan on offering other real-estate related items there shortly.

The rest of the site has not been sitting static either. Our Community section is alive and growing and new areas like our Real Estate Job Search page are becoming increasingly popular. If you haven't visited either recently I'd encourage you to check out those as well.

Let me know what you think of the new Inman.com. Email me your thoughts at joel@inman.com.

Thanks!

I know that a lot of you maintain a presence on a lot of different social media sites. You probably can't fit links to all of your profiles in your email signature, or easily on your blog or website. That's where retaggr comes in.

Retaggr is a site that allows you to enter the information for all of your online profiles in one place. The best part is that retaggr uses the information you input to generate an "interactive Web 2.0 social and business card." You can then embed the card on your blog, website, or email, and then when people view it, they can click on the icons and be taken instantly to the site of their choice, where they will land on your profile.

Ok, but here is the BEST part. If you have an Inman.com profile (you do have one, don't you?), you can enter the information into retaggr for inclusion on your profile card. How cool is that?

Here is how it works:

Go to retaggr and sign up for an account.

Click on the "customise profile card" tab, and then start entering in your personal and business information (you can include a photo, too).

Be sure to visit "websites you use." This is where you enter all of the information for the sites on which you maintain a profile.

Included in the list of sites is a classification for "real estate." The list will look like this:

 In the box for Inman.com, you will need to enter your Inman username. This is where I had some difficulty. In order to find out exactly how to enter the information, go to http://www.inman.com/community/members and do a search for yourself. When you click on the link, the URL of your profile will be revealed. It will look something like this: http://www.inman.com/community/members/daniel-rothamel-inman-community-manager

You just want to enter everything after the "members/" classification into the Inman box on retaggr. I had to enter "daniel-rothamel-inman-community-manager" Sounds funny, but that is the way it works.

Once you have put in all of the information, you can save it, and take a look at your profile card. It will look something like this:

There are then instructions for embedding the card on your website, blog, or even including it in your email signature. The whole card wouldn't fit in the sidebar of my blog, so I opted to embed the retaggr badge, which looks like this:

When people click on it, my profile card comes up, and people can connect to me through there.

Overall, retaggr is a pretty cool service. It certainly makes it easier to point people to one place that shows all of your social networking participation. And now, it makes it easier to show people that you are one of the dedicated real estate industry professionals that participates in the Inman Community.