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Todd Carpenter did a nice job chronicling the birth of real estate social media at http://realtynex.us/2010/01/29/a-six-year-history-of-the-re-net/.This is my contribution to these early days that I sent to Todd for his article:I met Larry Cragun at Inman 2006, who proudly proclaimed he was a real estate blogger. That got me started on blogging (my first blog article), and I’ve always called him my blog godfather. Teresa Boardman showed me enough of the ropes to blogging to be christened “blogmother” (Teresa, I still feel bad about the Weenie crisis that got you unfairly labeled as some sort of misanthrope, but it is still the funniest thing three years later). My first “virtual friends” (in 2006, everybody was in awe of the idea that friendships could be made by machine) Joe Ferrara, Jeff Corbett, Jim Cronin, Mary McKnight, continue to be social media lights. In August 2006, Teresa sent me an Active Rain invitation. Active Rain profoundly changed blogging into the conversation machine you now see on Facebook. The series of quick comments “Great article!” became more a salutation than a continuing discussion point. Real estate bloggers in late 2006 became re.net (term usually attributed to Greg Swann) and Real Estate 2.0 (oops, Redfin seemed to have trademarked that term and caused this Real Estate 2.x hoopla). The first Inman Bloggers Connect in the summer of 2007 was the christening of the blogger IRL events that have now become industry standard with the REBarCamps. In retrospect, it’s easy to see the real estate industry leads other industries in the adoption of social media (called “blogging” in 2006). Up to 2006, blogging was the province of techies and a burgeoning teenage crowd creating MySpace profiles (arguably a type of blog). Real estate agents jumped into blogging primarily …

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