The New York Times quoted me today about Fractional Ownership - I like their use of the phrase “Group Properties” - The property the mention is one I have visited, if you would like to learn more, please Contact Me

Perhaps the best way to follow me today is to do this on Twitter - I joined Twitter right at their beginning, I am fascinated by the concept. I even called my personal blog www.Twiku.com after a combination of the words “Twitter” and “Haiku” - (I have this dream of writing a series of 365 perfect Haiku, one each day of one year, each one using exactly 140 characters and the whole to tell a love story over a one year period - umm, I have not been able to write the first one yet).

Twitter is a mix of a mini-blog and a text message. At first all I was seeing is friends and followers telling me they are having a coffee or feeling tired - but Twitter is much more than this, by “following” and being “followed”, I can “feel the pulse” of some new ideas, or ask a quick question and get answers from people who have the same interests.

Come and follow follow me at …
http://twitter.com/montblanc/

Hope to see you there soon

I have been sending newsletters and blogging for over ten years - since before blogs were invented. I started the archives in 1998 and some of the old stuff is still in there.

I am very careful about adding subscribers - to get this newsletter, in theory, you filled in a form and then confirmed this with an email - a few people have written to me asking to be added and I would have sent a form through for this - many people are now subscribing by RSS which does not depend on email.

Each time I send out a newsletter I get a few unsubscribes - you can do this from a link at the bottom of the newsletter - happily I get more people joining than leaving. Occasionally I get mail from people demanding to be removed and accusing me of forcing them on my list. Some of these are graphic and I am fascinated to see that a person will “suffer” my writing for five years to finally tell me something like - “You’ve been sending me these for years. I have about as much interest in living in France as I do on sucking on a chainsaw!” - OK Gerry you are removed, I could say “buzz off”.

The newsletter, my websites and my blogs are there to offer you a service and I try to earn money by displaying relevant advertising from Google or other good commercial sites like Amazon. I am always happy to hear from you about what you would like me to research or write about.

Over the last three years I have been writing about the difficulties I have had since making a big mistake and losing control of my websites and my business in 2005. The stress and worry of this put me out of action for months and it was not until spring last year I started to recover my health.

Nearly ten years of building a successful Internet business was wiped out and starting again is much more difficult. I was lucky to have been a pioneer in Internet community sites, blogging and classified advertising online, but today there are literally millions of competitors and getting into search engines, which at the moment still means getting into Google and this needs a lot of money.

To try to get back on my feet, for the last year I have been working with Coast and Country who are real-estate agents on the French Riviera. I have been adding services for them in Languedoc and selling some property. It is a funny business, in France estate agents are a protected species, registration is difficult and the methods of selling are medieval. I have discovered that I am absolutely useless at being a house salesman and I am not fit enough to develop old properties anymore, so I am donning my fools clothing and must concentrate on building what is left of my Internet business, leaving the French real-estate business to the cheats and liars I found lurking under the ancient stones of Pezenas.

I launched http://www.AllRentalsFrance.com last December and had hoped to have been able to get help developing this - it is something I know a lot about as I started one of the first French rentals sites over ten years ago.

I am also developing the structure of a new community site aimed at people looking for a fresh start in life, whether a new country, new job or new friends. The name I still like best is http://www.PortableSoup.com because Portable Soup was a food designed for survival and exploration, just like my community.

There are other information sites I am working on which I plan to develop to help people find and choose property to buy or rent. The idea is to develop some of the new intelligent technologies in searching and mapping to eliminate estate agents and booking agencies and thus pass on huge savings to the end user. It is going to happen in the next few years and I would like to be one of the first to offer this.

So, here I am, starting all over again

It seems Ryanair are pleased with the work the people in Beziers have done to make their new Bristol-Beziers route a success, so they are operating a trial service from Stanstead in the summer.

The nice people from BlaBlaBlah sent me this notice about the dates and times for the flights.

I was transported back in time and space when walking the dogs through the lanes around our village this afternoon. I found myself in 1958 walking along a lane in Cornwall England wearing Boy Scouts uniform.

This was very strange as I was in a remote back lane between our village of Montblanc and the next one of St Thibery in the South of France.

I attribute this effect to the properties of the Fractal Resonance Alternative Neutron Collision Exciter - or FRANCE for short - this has the strange property of being able to show you what life was like fifty years ago.

Today I was transported by the seductive smell of growing grass and a shimmering clarity of light I remembered from a time of woggles, camp fires and billy cans of cocoa.

I don’t think the dogs noticed though, so I will try again tomorrow.

I think the biggest pleasure in writing any blog like this , perhaps in writing anything, is getting feedback and comments from readers . A lot of my stuff is about our life and experiences in living in the South of France and the reasons why we moved from the UK nearly 20 years ago. Many of the things I say are replies to questions I get and I often publish these to help others.

When we moved to the Languedoc, we adapted a large rambling old ruin in the village of Nizas and to help pay some bills made two apartments for vacation rentals. Over the five years we did this we made a lot of new friends and we now plan do a similar thing with our home in Montblanc and expect this to be sorted out for next year, so book now.

Luckily a lot of readers do come to our area and some ask me for information, often about finding a home or starting a business - I am happy to do this, so if you are in Languedoc drop me a line.

==

Dear Tony,

We were considering coming to your area this coming weekend…not quite decided yet, but if we do, would you be able to meet for a drink or something. Maybe we could pick your brain a bit, or just get to meet the person who has helped us a lot!
Also, if you can suggest a chambre d’hotes or a hotel in the area…
Best regards, Maryvonne

==

Hello Maryvonne,

I would be delighted to meet when you are in the area - I suggest Pezenas on Saturday which is a big open market and if you have not been before you can discover the old medieval city.

Next year we plan to open our own guest house, but there are several excellent places near here to stay - in Pezenas there is..

Hotelde Vigniamont tell Rob and Tracy I recommended them (I may get a free drink)

or a smaller place is La Dordine both are in the old town and charming.

A bit further out, but very special is Le Couvent which is one of the best in France according to the Sunday Times.

My phone numbers are in my signature at the end of this mail - call me when you are nearby, I look forward to a coffee (or glass of wine at sundown) - what is left of my brain is happy to be picked.

Best wishes

Tony

I am constantly on the lookout for useful tools. whether it is for a universal supermarket trolly key or using the internet more efficiently.

LinkBunch takes any number of links to pages and puts then into one short link I can use. For example, here is a list of some of my blogs - why is this useful? - well, for example, I can send this information by twitter, some sites only allow one link in comments, the listed links have SnapShotsshowing and, if this also shows the feeds than from one page you can link direct to all recent posts from all the blogs.

LinkBunch also have a Firefox Addon which will list all the tags open in the browser, this is a good way to log the pages open each day, for me this is better and simpler than bookmarking. If I combine LinkBunch with Snipurl I can make a tailored link which describes my daily browser tags like this . The addon works fine in the brilliant Flock browser

I couldn’t say it better myself, so to see France as I know and understand it read this column by Finn Skovgaard in the Telegraph .

Nothing’s impossible I have found…

Sometimes things look difficult and success seems a long way away - that seems to be when more things go wrong. If you have followed some recent writings in my blogs you have read me winging and complaining of how horrid things are - but - I have a song in my head which is like a ray of sunshine and I am sharing it with you.

… and start all over agin