We mentioned how easy it was to create web forms with Google Docs back in November. Now, technology blog TechCrunch is running a story about a very interesting do-it-yourself project combining the ease of Google Doc form creation with the enormous prospective bidder pool of Craigslist to form a rudamentary Internet bidding system.

Craigslist doesn’t natively support auctions. It does, however, have a ton of regular visitors, most of whom are looking to buy something. Those of us auctioneers who realize this fact about Craigslist frequently advertise our auctions there. The subject of the Techcrunch story had a Macintosh G5 to sell. He created a Google Docs form that posted name, email address and price to a read-only spreadsheet that hid the email addresses from everyone but him. He said that the highest bid received by noon Pacific time would be the winner and linked to the form and the spreadsheet from his Craigslist ad listing the auction.

What do you think of consumers directly leveraging the Craigslist buyer base using the auction method of marketing? To read the whole story, complete with screen shots of the bidding form and the spreadsheet, visit techcrunch.com.

It’s time for a little year-end housekeeping. With all of the top lists being created regarding the previous year, we couldn’t help but join in with a top list and a review of everything we’ve done so far. Here are our top six posts that we like.

1. ATS designation – Auction Technology Specialist for auctioneers
2. Today is a special day, vote for science
3. Example RFP for new or redesigned website
4. Accessible websites, more RFP ideas
5. Purple Wave unveils grouped extension system for equipment auction
6. Never use letters in advertised phone numbers

Aaron Traffas, CAI, ATS, CES is the author of AuctioneerTech

Here is our year in review, with a summary for each month. Don’t forget that you can always go straight to the posts for any given month using the links in the side bar on the right.

July
While the site launched in September, we cheated a little bit by scraping from other sources and populating it with a few related posts made previously on the NAA discussion forum as well as aarontraffas.com. We covered the NAA forum, Ubuntu Linux, and PDF tools, as well as mentioned hosted exchange, some other email clients and Google Apps. We touched on how Internet Explorer is a great browser so long as it’s fully patched. We talked about how while Windows Vista is slower than XP in speed, it’s superior to XP in many ways that count such as security, stability and forward compatibility.

August
We  only scraped one post for August, and that was a short post about Flash and website usability. We dove much deeper into the topic with a series of posts in November.

September
The site launched on September 8, but September 2 featured a scraped article from aarontraffas.com about the release of Google Chrome, which held our attention for a few weeks until we went back to Firefox and Opera. We covered OpenOffice 3, noted that eBay is declining and only accepting Paypal, and had the first article about auctioneers. We discussed advertising for Internet only auctions and Apple’s new iPods, as well as evangelized about Secunia, Twitter, and Skyfire. We migrated from one laptop to another and showed how MozBackup and Belarc Advisor help make the process easier. We examined how phpList makes bulk email list management easier for auctioneers and we also had two posts about PDFs showing that you should use them sparingly and never use Adobe products when the alternatives are faster and cheaper.

This author took part in the Kansas Auctioneer Association bid call competition at the Kansas State Fair and has a live blog from the experience as well as a video to prove it. The experience was the catalyst for a position post on why state associations should use computerized tabulation for bid call competitions.

September saw the first five Auction Podcasts as well as the listing of the series within the podcast section of iTunes. The episodes were based generally on content from existing posts on AuctioneerTech. There was the primier on advertising Internet only auctions, a tech roundup covering several shorter posts, and podcasts covering PDF and phpList.

Robert Mayo. CAI, CAGA, AARE was featured on Auction Podcast Episode 7

October
The first post in October was one of celebration after finally figuring out how to prevent the nasty screen flickering found when using an external monitor on some laptops loaded with Vista. While we were talking about multiple monitors, we showed how Synergy can be used to share your mouse between multiple computers, not just multiple screens. We noted and showed examples of how auctioneers are using WordPress for auction sites and described in depth the new Auction Technology Specialist designation offered by the NAA.

A new resource list was created that is an ongoing project listing all companies and providers involved with auction clerking, cashiering and Internet bidding. We showed how OpenDNS makes the web faster and safer, and how Google Adwords allows auctioneers to find a very targeted audience in a very short amount of time. We announced a critical security update for Windows and explained the importance of keeping your data encrypted while showing how Truecrypt makes it crazy-simple to do. For collaboration needs, we talked about how UStream makes it easy for auctioneers to broadcast video of events for free and how ShowMyPC and LogMeIn make Internet meetings free and much more simple than other expensive solutions such as GoToMeeting or WebEx. For those auctioneers who want to be a little geeky, we gave away the secret to a free education at W3 Schools.

Brandon Harker with Auction Flex was featured on Auction Podcast Episode 9

October’s podcasts covered Internet bidding as well as Adwords and OpenDNS. October found the first podcast guests in interviews with Robert Mayo of Mayo Auction and Realty and Brandon Harker of Sebae Data Solutions, makers of Auction Flex.

November
In November, we caught election fever and wrote about the importance of science in society and of ensuring that our elected officials understand the importance of science and technology. We discussed how hosted Exchange lets companies share Outlook contacts and calendars properly without the headache of managing an Exchange server.

We got geeky with files and talked about how 7-zip is the best compression utility and how a Drobo will let you sleep at night. We broke a story about AVG flagging one of the files in Adobe Flash as a virus, and we’re still getting several visits each day to the website from users searching for information about flashutil10a.exe.
Toward the end of November,we launched a series of discussions on what could go in an RFP for an auctioneer looking to build a new or redesign an existing website. Thanks to our friend Rob Spectre for posting some additional topics. We repeated that it was easy to use Google Docs to build simple web forms and wondered aloud if having auctions on Black Friday was a good idea.

Darron Meares, CAI, MBA, CPPA was featured on Auction Podcast Episode 10

November saw the Auction Podcast shift from being rehashed content on a separate page to new content included on the main page. November’s podcasts included an interview with Darron Meares of Meares Auction Group, a show on how open source software makes life easier and reduces expenses on software, and a controversial episode explaining that in many cases if you’re shipping auction items you’ve failed in marketing.

December
We continued our discussion about RFP ideas with some notes and comments about accessible websites. We looked from a marketing perspective at the importance of never using letters in advertised phone numbers, making sure an auction website had the upcoming auction calendar front and center with thumbnails, and ensuring that video is distributed properly. We also emphasized how important it is to be careful when browsing, and showed that Firefox users can browse freely and safely when running NoScript.

There were some interesting ideas covered such as Mahalo’s introduction of human-powered answers, as well as a New York auctioneer offering to negate the buyer’s premium in exchange for prepaid transactions. The National Auctioneers Association released the NAA Newsroom and Auction Answers and some dude royally ruined an auction by the Bureau of Land Management. Purple Wave released a new twist on the Internet only bidding model, a grouped extension feature that extends the entire group if a bid is received in the last few minutes.

The final Auction Podcast of 2008 covered dual agency with regards to absentee bid implementation. The final posts of the year included articles on letting your computer help science when you’re not using it, using Foxit Reader’s new typewriter tool to write on PDFs for free, and using Mint to automatically track your finances. We thanked you for racking up over 1000 listens to the Auction Podcast and encouraged you to go vote for the coolest tech of the year.

Going forward
It’s been a great four months; thanks to everyone for the kind words. Thanks to all of you who have left comments or feedback in response to articles or other comments, your participation is immensely valuable. Thanks to the guests who have been featured in podcasts and thanks to the guests who have already committed to podcast appearances in 2009. Have a safe and happy New Year’s Eve. We’ll see you next year.

Lunarpages is a company that offers very robust and generous website hosting plans. Their control panel is easy to use and automates the installation of many popular scripts such as WordPress, Drupal, etc.

One of their value-added services is a monthly newsletter that they send out to their customers. The most recent issue discusses using Google Docs to easily create a simple web contact form. It may be worth your while if you’re looking for an easy way to allow customers to submit information on your website.

http://www.web-hosting-newsletter.com/2008/11/26/use-google-docs-to-create-a-form/

I recently took part in the Kansas Auctioneers Association bid-call contest at the Kansas State Fair. This was my third time competing, having also done so in 2002 and 2006. I’ve also seen other contests, such as the National Auctioneers Association International Auctioneer Championship and the Oklahoma State Auctioneers Association competition.

The NAA IAC this year used a computerized scoring system, with a computer for each judge and a large display that showed the leaderboard. As a contestant finished and left the stage, the display would update before the next contestant began, showing the score as well as the new ranking. A boo or cheer from the crowd would usually accompany both the addition of new leaders as well as the departure of previous leaders from the rankings who were liked by the crowd.

The challenges faced by the local auction contests are many. Kansas, for example, uses paper score sheets from each of its – this year – five judges. These sheets must be tabulated by hand for each contestant, so after each round of the competition, there is a delay between the last contestant and the announcement of the rankings as someone uses a calculator at a breakneck pace. This manual tabulation begs – nay, demands – errors to be made at some point. I know that last year a friend of mine added the scores on his sheets and came up with a number 65 points greater than the sum total written and circled on the top sheet of his stack that was used when ranking the finalists.

Another challenge is always one of politics. With many associations choosing judges from within their ranks, losing contestants seem always to be found grumbling after the awards have been distributed about how political or preferential the judging was that particular year.

How can these challenges be overcome? Unfortunately, I don’t expect that they will be any time soon. The old guard in charge of many of the associations may see a different way as a more difficult or arduous way, even if a different way may actually be easier, faster and fairer.

I’m sure that not every local contest has the budget for change. In fact, I’d wager that the local contests have little if any budget at all, relying on donations for the items sold or mandating that the contestants themselves bring three items. This latter procedure makes the contest even more unfair, affording some more affluent auctioneers the luxury of bringing more expensive items to sell and sounding better for achieving a higher price. I know that I’ve been in contests when I didn’t have much disposable income and was forced to sell things I already owned as I watched others go buy new items to sell.

I’m sure that the software system used by the NAA is expensive. I’m not advocating its use, nor am I advocating the distribution of computers to each judge. I believe a system can be devised that would require only Internet access. This access is already available for those auction contests held at conventions in hotels. For contests held at the outdoor events and fairs, it would merely be something to require from the event staff.

The software part is the easy part. Something as simple as Google Spreadsheets could be used, with each judge sharing the spreadsheet with the scorekeeper so that each judge didn’t have access to the scores of others, but that the scorekeeper or person in charge of tabulation could see the scores from all the judges. As simple as the requirements are, it would be feasible to have a system custom made using www.rentacoder.com that was tailor-made to the association’s requirements and judging criteria. Such a web-based solution could be built in four or five hours. Either Google Spreadsheets or the custom solution would allow for rapid tabulation. From a contestant’s point of view, being able to take a print-out of the performance scores would be an invaluable resource to reflect on how to be better in the future while the performance is still in recent memory.

One added benefit to such a system would be that it would require the rules and procedures to be thought-out and dictated ahead of the competition. It would not allow for late-in-the-game rule changes made after the contest had started as happened in Kansas this year.

Requiring the judges to bring their own laptops would solve the computer problem. The Internet access, should it be deemed too expensive or not possible by the event staff at an outdoor event, could easily be provided through the use of a wireless cell router. Many models are now being sold directly by the wireless carriers.

Finally, using foreign judges, judges who are not a member of the local association holding the contest, would reduce the propensity for contestants to hold questions about the political nature of the scores. The only thing bigger than an auctioneer’s voice is his ego, and being asked to judge a competition in another state would be seen my most as a compliment. The use of one or two non-auctioneer judges would also be something worth consideration, as I often wonder if judges reward the contestants who sound like them or their ideal auctioneer sound and discount those contestants who many not sound ideal but may perhaps annunciate better or have a clearer or faster chant.

I had a great time at the contest this year and I intend to compete in many more, both in Kansas and perhaps at the IAC. I think that by using electronic tabulation and foreign judges, as well as a predetermined and published set of rules that aren’t changed or determined after the competition starts, the local contests can be faster, smoother, easier and fairer.

Do you agree with me? Do I have it all wrong? Let me know in the comments.