Internet Entrepreneurs Blog

I know the metaphor of the online land grab in the late 1990s has been way overdone to the point of cliche but I think the metaphor can be extended in a more meaningful way. Typically the land grab referred to “cyber-squatters” who purchased domain names in hopes of selling them later to desperate companies establishing online identities. Today I like to think of online entrepreneurs as landlords more than speculative flippers.

I’ve had a fair interest in real estate for quite some time but I’ve always had a hard time reconciling my interest in real estate with my larger interest in e-commerce. Perhaps my interest in real estate came from my civil engineering studies in my undergrad days or from my summer construction jobs in the southeast. Recently, however, I realized what really attracts me to real estate and e-commerce is the ability of both to extract rents.

Real estate investors buy properties so they can take in rental income from renters. Eventually, the hope goes, a real estate investor will have enough properties to live comfortably collecting checks from the properties he has acquired over several years of wise investment. For me, e-commerce offers the same hope. If one can build enough sites bringing in advertising revenues, there is little left to be done but sit back and collect the checks. This oversimplification is, of course, ignoring depreciation, competition, etc. but you get the point.

Speaking of real estate, I highly recommend two home shows on TV these days. One is called Property Ladder and it follows amateur investors buying homes, fixing them up, and hoping to resell them months later for tidy profits. The second show is called Flip this House and it follows Richard Davis, a Charleston, SC real estate investor who has a team that identifies properties, fixes them up in weeks, and then resells the units. Richard seems to be the man and a fun guy to work with, probably my favorite show on television these days. Hey Richard, if you’re looking for an MBA with limited real estate experience (I did take a class called Real Estate Entrepreneurship), give me a call, I would love to work with you when I graduate!

I’ve been deluged recently with bogus trackbacks on this blog and I’m really fed up. Unfortunately this version of BBlog doesn’t give you the option of manually approving trackback responses like it does for comments so spammers are able to post their links on the site automatically. I do get an email notification of trackbacks but these messages always get caught in my spam inbox because the names of the sites contain viagra, cialis, etc. in them. There must be a better solution!

The best I could come up with is to turn off the appearance of trackbacks on my blog. So essentially the trackback URL still works and trackbacks are still added to my database but they aren’t displayed on the site. This is pretty annoying for legitimate trackbacks since their link won’t appear but I honestly don’t know what else to do. Yet another important technology rendered useless by the spammers…