I just discovered a new video series by TVO called, The Life-Sized City. It’s all about the “anatomy of the modern metropolis.” The first episode – which was released on Sep 13 – is on Medellin and is just under an hour long. I have a feeling that many of you will like this video series.

Whenever I watch videos like this, it makes me think that I should be starting a city building-focused vlog. I am a big fan of this format. I follow a handful of vloggers. And I think it could be a lot of fun. But sometimes you just have to say no.

For those of you who aren’t longtime readers, I would also like to point out that my good friend Alex Feldman wrote a guest post on this blog over 3 years ago following a trip to Medellin. It’s about what cities could learn from Medellin’s extraordinary turnaround. If you missed it, click here.

I was out with for a bike ride the other night with a good friend of mine and we were talking about all of the creative and social media-based projects that we would like to do. Everything from a daily vlog to a regular podcast. Sadly there are only so many things one can focus on.

If you’ve been reading this blog since the beginning of this year, you’ll know that I’ve been trying to write a book on “becoming a real estate developer.” I believe there’s a lot of interest in this topic. It’s the number one question I receive from readers: “How do I become a developer?”

But with everything that’s going on this year, I have decided to turn the research and writing I have done to date into a blog series that I’m calling BARED (Becoming A Real Estate Developer). I’ve interviewed a lot of fantastic people in the business and I want to get that information out there.

The focus of the series – which was the intent of the book – is to uncover the early decisions and first projects that these now successful developers made and took on. In other words, it’s less about their current successes and more about what they did to get there.

So no book. But expect to see the first BARED post very shortly. I think I’ll start with 3 posts and then gauge the response.

This morning, instead of my usual routine of writing alongside a cup of coffee, I decided to finally edit all of the skiing and snowboarding footage that I took last month in Park City, Utah. Click here for the final cut.

Compared to the video we did for Jackson Hole, I don’t like the selfie perspective as much. It doesn’t show enough of the person. This time we used the Go Pro 3-way arm, but in Jackson we used a plastic tube that I think was used for a beer funnel before that. Next year we’ll go back to that.

Video is a lot of fun and I would love to figure out a way to incorporate more of it into this blog. But that’s a far bigger time commitment and I am not prepared to allocate resources to that. I write every day. That’s my thing.

I am, however, not ignorant to what’s happening in the world of video blogging. And I think there are lots of opportunities for businesses who have the resources to allocate towards projects like this.

Take for instance this vlog by New York video guy Casey Neistat. It’s probably the best piece of marketing that the Phantom 4 drone could have asked for. It’s authentic. I watched it and now I want one. Take my money. 

(Note to city geeks: It’s worth watching just for the drone aerials of Cape Town, South Africa.)

To my knowledge, I don’t think people are doing anything like this in the real estate business. But eventually it will happen. Because people are becoming increasingly immune to your typical marketing pieces.