Foreign Perspectives

Archive for April, 2007

As you know, I was one of the first to repost the 2kbloggers list last Thursday and in common with Bob and Chino had my blog suspended from Technoratis listings temporarily (Angela by chance didn’t make the list clickable). It would have been rather more than a temporary suspension but for the words of wisdom from Bob.

Now, Technorati have gotten around to replying to us as to the reason for the suspension in a comment on Bob’s site. Seems that were a substantial number of the 2kbloggers to have similarly reposted the list, their whole ranking system would have become worthless. Their reasoning is that their system is intended to give high rankings to blogs which get a lot of relevant links.

Emm, guys€¦ if that’s the case, how come you allow the growth of blog reviews’ as a side-line to the likes of John Chow? For that matter, how come you allow the growth of blog review blogs at all? After all, the link that I have on this blog to bloggyaward is hardly a relevant outbound link to me, is it? (Although the words of wisdom from Mr Bloggy will be getting acted on in due course).

This isn’t to knock John Chow who, after all, is only out to make a buck online as are most of us. I’m just asking, how come it’s OK for him to run a long series of blog review’ competitions for his blog and thereby gather up hundreds if not thousands of inbound links, yet it’s not OK for those on the 2kblogger list to do the same?

To my mind, it highlights a severe weakness in the Technorati system. If they want the system to rank blogs on the basis of relevant links then those are the only links that they should count. They’re probably going to turn around and say that it’s impossible to distinguish a relevant link from an irrelevant one but that’s not the case. At a simplistic level, it would be relatively easy for them to only count links from site A to site B where A had more than one link to B. That in itself would exclude any irrelevant cross-linking that might happen from a spread of the 2kblogger list and the like.

After all, how long is it going to be before some awkward sod like myself decides to set up several thousand one page blogs all pointing to their main blog? For that matter, what will happen when (and it will be “when”, not “if”) someone runs up, say, 25,000 one page blogs and thereby ends up in the top 10 on Technorati?

All this, of course, aside from the freedom of speech angle. Actually, knowing bloggers, I’d be quite worried about that particular angle being taken up if I were in Technorati at the moment. There’s a LOT of support for freedom of expression out there in blog-land.

Ironically though, that 2kblogger post has actually attracted a growing number of relevant posts to my blog. So, yes, almost 1800 people now have a link from me that’s not too relevant but I correspondingly have links back which are relevant. In fact, I’ve found that looking at irrelevant’ blogs often turns up relevant links for me, hence all the click-throughs from me to those that look at my site.

Whilst I’m feeling quite chuffed at moving from a 200k ranking on Technorati down to 100k in a couple of days John Chow is the true master of such things and presently sitting at number 154. Even better, his blog is there to help you make money online, in this particular instance by (hopefully) driving traffic to Foreign Perspectives. All that’s required is to link to his blog.

His blog is just filled with ways of making money online so all being well, once I’ve worked through them all, I’ll be able to give up the day job.

This seems to be my week for marketing the blog!

Most of the time, I’m incredibly lazy about doing it and it’s just gotten to where it is today by chance for the most part. In fact, I didn’t really do any promotion of it worth talking about ’til this week when it was something of a blitz that I’ve not yet recovered from. I started the week with the blogsite submission service at DirectoryVault which at $23 seems something of a bargain. To be fair, there was some duplication with the dribble of promotion that I’d done on a now and again basis over the last six months or so. Things like the obvious of Technorati and Feedburner mainly but it did turn up a considerable number of seemingly good places that I’ve never heard of before.

Even if you are intending to live the rest of your life in France, you should resist the temptation to close any UK bank accounts or credit cards. The only exception to this is, possibly, for those accounts/cards which have an annual fee.

In addition to the accounts which you already have, you may find it useful to open others as the international dimension changes how you use accounts. For instance, if you have a holiday home in France you’ll obviously be transferring money from pounds into euros much more than you were previously.

The range of accounts in the UK is massive and therefore we can only give an indication of those that you might find useful here; the reference version of this guide will be more comprehensive.

The Nationwide Building Society Flexaccount (cheque account) is a must. It gives you entirely free transfers from pounds to euro and, at the moment, is the only truly free currency exchange service. Their credit card comes close behind with free exchange on purchases.

Beyond that, if you are going to live in France, it’s useful to open credit cards with a number of card issuers. In general, you will not be able to do this if you are living in France and neither can you easily get credit facilities in France so it’s useful to have a number of UK cards as a fallback should you need it. The main issuers are Capital One, the Co-Operative, GE, Halifax, HSBC, LloydsTSB, MBNA, Nationwide and Royal Bank of Scotland (most other cards are rebranded versions of these eg Sainsbury is really Halifax). It’s worth getting an American Express credit card too as you can transfer the account to France, although as the charges in France are considerably higher you may not want to do that right away.

Cheque accounts are also useful to have. If you qualify for the HSBC Premier service, they’ll open an equivalent account with HSBC France for you which has the additional advantage that you get free transfers between your UK and French accounts with them. Barclays and LloydsTSB offer a similar (but more expensive) service though their branches are largely confined to Paris and the Cote d’Azur. The Barclays account offers withdrawals with no transaction charge at BNP-Paribas machines in France (you are still charged 2.75% on the exchange rate). I used to recommend Citibank a lot but they have increased their charges substantially and it’s not as clearly a useful account for expats as it once was.

The Nationwide account is excellent if you are in France and need to transfer relatively small amounts of money from the UK but the £500 per day (about 750‚€) limit means that it’s not practical for large amounts such as for your house purchase. You can use your own bank for this but the charges are generally quite high and the exchange rate isn’t particularly good either in most cases. To transfer more than a few thousand euros you are best to open an account with one of the specialist companies such as moneybookers; if you are going to be making regular transfers (eg paying for a French mortgage from a UK account) then HIFX offers a facility for this.

If you are retaining your house in the UK as we recommend, then you will probably need to change the mortgage to a buy to let one. It’s best to do this before you leave the UK as there are a relatively small number of brokers who deal with overseas clients.

The field of investments in the UK is even wider than the range of banks. However, most seem prepared to change your address to an overseas one. However, if you don’t yet have a UK broker or similar it’s worthwhile opening an account with one before you leave as few will open accounts for overseas clients. We’ll cover it in more detail later but at this point it’s worth mentioning that having a SIPP (Self-invested personal pension) account open is also useful.

If you’ve not yet ventured into this arena, a few useful accounts to have are the Halifax sharebuilder (which lets you buy shares monthly), Fidelity’s Funds Marketplace (which lets you buy numerous unit trusts) and TD Waterhouse brokerage. All are free to open.

As always, you can find links to sites we have mentioned in the Foreign Perspectives directory along with other similar outfits which we haven’t had the space to mention here and the reference version of this entry on our Living in France pages is more complete.

Although you can open offshore bank accounts after you leave, it’s best to open your choice from the above before you leave the UK as it can be difficult or even impossible to do it after you leave.