Closed for Business
You'll find the full explanation elsewhere, but the long and short of it was that BLOG the BOB turned out to be illegal!
Yes, afraid so ... in Ontario, it is illegal to refer people to business premises for sale unless you have a real estate board license -- yes, even if you are not making any money in the deal, even if you are just telling people, "Click on this link to go to their site" -- what's worse, if you read through the comments in that link, you'll see the agents themselves were very hostile to having their websites mentioned on another site. Really.
With zero publicity (only weblogs.com pings) and in just three days' run, BLOG the BOB was generating 200 page-reads per day, with 35 qualified (ie clickthrough) free sales leads per day from people interested in Bruce County business opportunities; at the end of the third day we received a note from an agent questioning the legality of our site, so I asked her to confirm that for us.
On the fourth day we received a strongly worded email from the local real estate board head-office, in no uncertain terms, hinting of legal action, demanding this site be purged from the Internet before 5pm that day.
Amazing, isn't it?
Here we were just thinking we'd do for these boarded up and closed shops what Gizmodo does for gadgets; we really thought this would be a great way to drive some real traffic to those hopelessly inept excuses for webapp user-interfaces over on the individual agent websites simply by blogging updates in their listings, citing them with attributions and links just like you'd blog any other news or information source ... and it turns out to be illegal and offensive?
Go figure.
Anyway, this page is quite popular, strong evidence of a the market for timely cottage-country business opportunity news online. Unfortunately, if such a service is allowed to exist somewhere out there on the great landscape of bloggerdom, it is not here.
Sorry for the inconvenience.
