Archive for May, 2007
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So it’s Sarkozy: what now for France?
May 7th, 2007 | 
Author: The margin was relatively slim (53/47) but France has, much to my surprise, chosen the president that it needs at this time.
His first hundred days are likely to be turbulent ones and I suspect that last nights riots across France are merely a taster of things to come. Many of his policies seem to run against the deep socialist grain of French thought and practices.
The 35 hour week is to be reviewed. That was one of the planks of job creation from the socialist era. Reduce the time that anyone is allowed to work and everyone will have more work, won’t they? Well, perhaps in theory if you drop the permitted working hours by 10% you might think that employers will need 10% more people to get through the work but that’s only going to work with cuts much larger than 10%. As is clear everywhere else in the world, semi-parttime workers get through just as much work as full-time workers do.
Immigration rules are to be tightened up. This one seems pretty strange coming from the son of immigrants. The counterpart to this is that he seems likely to work with the countries in northern Africa to form a kind of African Union to help improve the economies of those countries.
France is to become a little bit more capitalist too as he plans to reduce the regulations on businesses to make the job creation process much easier. Taxes too are to be reduced to improve the incentive to work.
Will he have the strength of character to follow through on these reforms is the biggest question though. I think he will: he seems to have that inner strength that is so necessary to do it.
Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.Stewart & Douglas Family History
Family history is something of a now and again activity for me.
When I found the big family bible some years ago, I had a major flurry of activity going through it and integrating all the information into what I already had and then it was a few years before anything else happened.
Then there was the arrival of the Mormon family history site which seemingly filled in numerous details that were missing from the family bible. Mainly places of birth and death but also a number of relatives who weren’t mentioned in the family bible. I also ventured into the various family history forums on the Internet but with a name like Stewart they’re not nearly so useful as you might expect as there are just too many Stewarts around in the world these days.
It’s worth looking at that site now and again and indeed the forums as people add information to the various sites over time. By doing that, I picked up a whole branch of the family that we were sure had died out in the 1930s although I’ve not, yet, firmed up contact with them as yet.
Anyway, that’s all to introduce our new blog at Stewart Family History. As with my other activities in the family history arena, the entries on that’ll likely be now and again affairs but we’ll see. It’s separate from Foreign Perspectives as it doesn’t really fit here and should, in due course, interest a whole different bunch of people.
Initially, it’ll be principally the Stewart line as you’ll gather from the domain name but I’ll be starting into the Douglas history too fairly shortly and will no doubt add other names as I go along.
Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.The war graves in France
I find the cemeteries in France really fascinating.
Naturally there are loads of military ones around the sites of past battles in the two world wars. The second world war ones up around the Normandy beaches are perhaps the most impressive in terms of the sheer scale of carnage that they represent. However, in addition to those there are many much smaller WW1 cemetries dotted around the landscape. The area of the Somme has untold numbers of these from the large Thiepval and numerous smaller versions in that area from the Ulster Tower to relatively small Australian ones.
One thing that they all have in common is that every single grave in them is still well tended for, no matter how long ago the death occured. As we were going through the Somme cemeteries last year, every one looked as though it was only filled a few weeks ago. Don’t forget that these graves are getting on for 100 years old by now too. The reason for this is simple of course: the Commonwealth War Graves Commission really live up to the phrase “they shall not be forgotten” and are constantly caring for the graveyards and refurbishing the headstones.
Of course, they don’t just look after the major graveyards and the photo here is that of the brother of my grandfather sitting in a cemetery in Lisburn, Northern Ireland, one of a couple of dozen or so scattered around that particular graveyard.
Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for dummies; Techie blog reviews
As ‘yall know, I’ve been one of the participants of the Technorati Favourites Exchange (TFX) over the last few weeks which had the aim of getting a whole bunch of people into the top 100 favourited blogs list on Technorati. It’s been very successful too with the composition of that top 100 changing entirely.
So far, I’ve not yet made it as the barrier seems to move up every time I think I’m about to get in at number 100 but I’m not really that bothered as I’ve learnt far more over the last couple of weeks about promoting FP than I would otherwise have done in months if not years. Anyway, I thought I’d share some of that with you here.
First off, it’s very clear that the way to go with the adsense ads is the big square block that you see on FP these days. That’s the one that all the big money making blogs use and when we talk big money, one clocked up $8500 in March.
Getting the traffic up is key to that $8500 of course and with that in mind I’m pleased to see that the link exchanges that are part and parcel of the TFX have moved me into the top 40k of blogs with well over 100 incoming links to date. If you get the chance, it’s definitely worthwhile participating in one of the many link trains around.
What’s also quite useful in increasing the income from the blog/website is to improve the ranking of Alexa and Google. Now, google is staffed with some smart cookies so it’s not too easy to outsmart them and, by and large, what you need to do is to bump up the number of incoming links over a period of time. Naturally that means that your Google ranking isn’t going to go from zero to seven in a couple of months and indeed it’s taken me about eight months to get to PR4 with FP and, all being well, it’ll be at PR5 or perhaps PR6 at the next review (due around July).
However, Alexa is a completely different story. What’s clear is that being in the top 100k sites in Alexa brings in significant cash benefits in that people are prepared to pay more for links from such a site, for you to write articles about them, etc. if you’re in that top 100k. The Alexa people seem to be a completely dumber bunch than those at Google (sorry guys, but it looks like that from here) though and it seems to sufficient merely to download the Alexa toolbar and just look at your own site. Doing that has knocked off 100k from my ranking in a matter of days and I’m not even milking it by just sitting and hitting refresh either. Will it be possible to get into the top 100k doing that though? I think it will as friends of ours with a broadly similar “real” readership are bouncing along at around 100k yet with the location of the readership obviously completely squewed by them accessing their own pages.
What’s also clear is that there’s a whole lot of people out there who think that throwing together a blog is a doddle as everything is totally automated. Well, not quite everything is automated and I’ve picked up loads of great ideas from looking at the various blogs participating in the TFX which I’m gradually incorporating into FP.
If anyone’s interested, I can do a little technical review of their site and point out the various things that they could usefully do to get the traffic up. All I’m asking for the moment is that you do a little article mentioning Foreign Perspectives on your own blog. I’ll consider reviewing non-blog sites too but that would be a chargeable thing.
Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.The RSS Link Train
Thanks to Nia for putting me on to Bob’s new Feed My Feed game, this will help increase the estimated RSS feed on ReviewMe.com.
So here is how the game is played:
The Feed Link Chain is a blog Link game that is gaining in popularity within the blogosphere. Unlike other blog games which focused on getting backlinks, this one is going to help you increase your Feed Readers.
All you have to do is
(1) Add your name and the feed link to the chain along with the names and feeds of three blogs that you would like to include.
(2) Simply publish the new list to your blog and allow your readers to participate in the game by continuing the chain!
(3) Link back to me in your post and make a comment HERE with the three sites you’ve added; I’ll add them to the list on my site so that others, when copying the list from my site will be propagating your three as well!
All the blogs mentioned in the chain are worth reading so do add them to your feeds and spread the word around.
Visit Feedburner for a URL feed for each site if you don’t already have that.
The List:
