In a way, Zillow is attempting to combine its real estate data with the citizen journalism movement, encouraging people who live in select neighborhoods to upload photos, events, news and other information.

The idea is that people will not only visit Zillow to learn about homes, but -- one could imagine -- local restaurants, recent crimes or the history of the neighborhood. With this feature, you could also see Zillow moving down the path of trying to link people together in certain neighborhoods to share a lawnmower, sell a grill, host a fundraiser or, perhaps, find a date. And if that occurs, the real estate information and Zestimates offered by Zillow today might just be a Trojan horse into other lucrative advertising markets.

Nearly 80 percent of home buyers start their search on the Internet - soon they'll have more to look at.

On its Web site, the Peninsula on Indian River Bay development in Delaware has begun using high-quality, television news-style presentation to sell homes. On the site, viewers take interactive tours of the property, led by two on-line hosts, through different site "channels."

According to Roland Varesko, president of Ecendent Interactive, the production company that put together Peninsula's site, nobody is doing this on as grand a scale as the Peninsula. "It's like having your own TV show," he says.

But the trend is sure to spread. Even now, the economics are such that a development of 50 to 100 homes could afford a Web site like Peninsula's, according to Varesko. And big real estate brokers, such as Century 21, Coldwell Banker (both part of Realogy) and Re/Max, are quickly ramping up.

"I believe streaming videos on Web sites is the wave of the future," says Charlie Young, vice president for marketing for broker Coldwell Banker.

Things have changed on the off-line front. I have to go now. It has been a lot of fun. I might be back sometime in the future, but I need to stop for awhile anyway.

TaTa For Now.

Usually, the VHB provides links, charts, stats and commentary (like about the number of properties on the Vancouver market and their average prices, historical patterns, comparisons between Vancouver and other cities) that have the implicit questions -- is this a bubble and will it crash?

His last post on Friday left no indication that a halt was in the works, so those who visited his blog on Monday morning expressed surprise. "This is very sudden and I am sad to hear that the mysterious VHB will no longer be making the prescient posts I have become used to reading over the past 12+ months," said a commenter named Mohican.

"Please!!! Don't go! She'll come round!! Just involve her more...She can do some graphs and you guys can research, together," said a commenter named Mighty Mouse.

"Well good luck with that. If you can, keep the site alive. It will be interesting to go back and check the comments in the future. We are going to look like either prescient geniuses or ignorant boobs. I don't think there is much in between," said a commenter named Freako.

Thanks to all who have posted such nice things over the past few weeks. Life is going very well, thank you. I do miss blogging in a way, but on the whole it is better to get on with the coolness that is life. Enjoy the crash! (Whenever it comes . . .) VHB out.

For the first time ever recorded, Americans owe more money than they make. Household debt levels have now surpassed household income by more than eight percent, reaching 108.4 percent in 2005, according to a May 2006 study by the Center for American Progress. Consumer debt is now at a record $2.17 trillion, reports the Federal Reserve Board and consumers cashed out a whopping $431 billion in home equity last year.

Have you been able to support yourself with this blog? If not, what else do you do for a living?
Right now, it is paying all my bills. I can't complain. It's what I want to do. I got to kind of a crossroads in the summer of 2005. I was putting a lot of time in, I didn't have any ads up, and I told myself and my family I was going to make a decision about whether to stop-[but] I decided it just seemed like too much to just walk away from. I decided to keep going because it seemed to matter to people, and it seemed like there was something good that would come out of it. I don't relish the idea of anybody losing money.

Some of your contributors have urged you to write a book about the housing bubble. Any plans to do that?
I am working on a project about blogging already. I would like to write a book viewing the housing mania through the lens of my blog.

This week a Gang of Seven law professors and sociologists started a new blog, creditslips. (Upfront confessions-I'm one of the Gang.) The topics are tumbling out-pension reforms, medical bankruptcy, collecting from people even after they file bankruptcy and hurricane relief. Credit junkies who are regulars on Warren Reports will want to check it out.

Now let's add a third dot to the picture-the impact of an effectively unregulated home mortgage market. Over the past five years, lenders have sold billions of dollars of mortgages that are designed to go into eventual default because the borrowers cannot possibly afford to pay them. These so-called "creative mortgage products" have two powerful effects: They fueled the boom, pouring more money into an overheated housing market. Now they will accelerate the bust, pushing more people out of their homes through distressed sales, thereby accelerating price collapses on the way down. In other words, a housing bust doesn't just happen. Regulators who won't regulate have an effect as well.

The fever may be most intense at Jones' free site, created after his first bubble blog crashed in May from trying to handle its 20,000 daily hits. His latest site doesn't run advertising and therefore he derives no revenue from it.

A self-described "economic activist," Jones, 41, sees his mission as chronicling a seminal financial event, something future scholars can turn to just as historians today would read an anthology of letters written by Dutch tulip traders in the 1630s.

"In 100 years, economists may be studying the comments of this blog because this was a real-time skeptics' log in the middle of a financial mania," said Jones, who rents a house with his wife in Sedona, Ariz., and doesn't own any real estate.

Jones' fervor stems largely from his status as a casualty of the dot-com meltdown, when he was the controller at an Austin, Texas, Internet firm that he declined to name. He resigned in 1999 before the company went bankrupt, after he spent a stressful final year trying to convince his entrepreneur bosses that "companies really do need to make money."

The housing market today "is just like the tech bubble," said Jones, who holds economics and business degrees from Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls, Texas. "That's why it's a mania — because people have forgotten the fundamentals."