Davos Newbies

In another corner of the blog world, the entertaining property blogs from upstart Redfin have been axed because the crucial Multiple Listing Service threatened the company with shutdown. Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman explains:

After almost a year of negotiations came to a head with the Northwest Multiple Listing Service (NWMLS), Redfin announced yesterday morning that it would no longer publish in-person reviews on our blog. NWMLS rules forbid Redfin from advertising another broker’s listing, and the NWMLS deemed our reviews (particularly the harsh ones) as an advertisement. The NWMLS fined Redfin and has explained that our compliance with the rules is a prerequisite for continuing to access its database of listings. It is Redfin’s first major setback with an MLS, and everyone here is a little blue about it.

In my household, this is of more than passing interest. My wife, Tracey Taylor, is one of the Redfin bloggers – the best of the lot to my mind (I would say that, wouldn’t I, but judge for yourself). Blogging for Redfin enabled her to combine two things she enjoys – looking at houses and writing – and get paid a bit for the pleasure. To my mind, the MLS pressure on Redfin isn’t because of anything that has been written about houses. It’s the discount commission Redfin provides buyers. Realtors are one of the old-style cartels that desperately need to be broken up. It will happen eventually and everyone will wonder why it was tolerated for so long.

I’ve just started reading Diplomacy Lessons, by John Brady Kiesling, who has the distinction of being the only US government official to resign on principle over the war in Iraq. It looks very promising, but paging through my copy I was startled to see some blanked out passages. Here’s Kiesling’s explanation:

To obtain my State Department security clearance I signed an agreement that I would not publish a book on my experiences without submitting it to the State Department for a security review. I complied. My reviewer, always helpful and courteous, was able to persuade the agencies involved to disgorge my manuscript after five months.

More often than not, secrecy is a cloak for incompetence. Perhaps this is why the current US administration is the most secretive in recent history. Four agencies generated a list of some seventy-two requested deletions, many of them prudent but others based on the misconception that foreigners would read my book but not their own newspapers.

Pretending that covert operations can be kept secret from their victims indefinitely is wishful thinking or worse. Retired CIA officials talk pretty freely to journalists and write self-glamorizing memoirs.

I made a good-faith effort to respect my obligations without undermining the utility of the book to the US public. Where the requested deletions were legitimate I made them without noting them in the text. I also rewrote key episodes to replace arguably sensitive examples with information available to any newspaper reader. Where words or paragraphs are blacked out in the text, it is a plea to readers to be skeptical of their government’s desire to keep them in the dark.

Many blogs that I read have the helpful habit of alerting readers to prolonged absence. I used to do the same myself. But I just looked up and realized that I’ve been away from Davos Newbies for more than a fortnight. So here’s a metaphoric clearing of the throat to announce I’m back in the room.

The simple explanation for my long hiatus is that both my mind and my time were too crowded with other activities to write anything I thought worthwhile here. At work, I’ve been involved in a mammoth project that is now nearing completion. There are loose ends to tidy up, but the heavy-duty effort of construction is largely over. At home, my tennis obsession probably got slightly out of control in the last month, as I’ve juggled the two teams I captain and added another one where I’m merely a player. I’ve long had the aspiration of playing tennis every day, and I came close to realizing that dream. But it meant that too much else – most glaringly family life, but the blog, too – got squeezed.

Anyhow, I think mind, body and spare time are now in a more healthy balance. So I plan to return to something like regular posting.