Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

Blogging reviews seem to come in two basic flavours: 1) nice ones just to get the link and 2) proper ones that are actually useful.

Much as the first type serve their purpose in getting you a link to your site and they’re the safest ones to go for, they’re pretty much useless except for the linkback that they provide. In practice, they’re not overlly useful for that link either as, for the most part, bloggers with really high PR rarely review those with much lower PR who could benefit most.

The second type can be pretty scary though. After all, who among us has a “perfect” blog? Probably 99% of us have just picked the first reasonable looking template and ran with that so there’s usually a lot of scope for criticism on that front (my current one has been described as “Kermit the frog” for instance). Likewise, sod’s law applying as always chances are that they’ll look at your blog when you’ve just written a bunch of posts that are “less than your best” at best and more than likely they’ll be “total ****” even if all your other posts have been Pulitzer material.

But, that second type is far and away the most useful type to get. Sure, there’ll be things that you disagree with either partially or even entirely, but so what? You’re hardly likely to be writing stuff that people will agree with all the time, are you? On the other hand you’ll almost certainly get some useful ideas that you can implement to improve things. For example, about a year ago one one of the “type 2 reviews” that I got pointed out that it was a pain to have to page through endless posts on how to move to France and that I should collect them in one place, so there’s now a link to a compilation of them under “Series Collections” as you can see.

What a “type 2” review doesn’t have to be is nasty. Yes, you may well get a review where someone basically criticises everything on your blog (unlikely, but possible) but they don’t have to be nasty about it and I’ve yet to see one where they were out and out nasty.

Anyway, if anyone’s interested in a review from me, and will review this blog in return, let me know!

Camera technology is moving so fast these days that it’s getting to be pretty much a lottery as to when is the best time to buy a camera.

For instance, I’d pretty much come to the conclusion that the Pentax Option S10 was the perfect camera to be my next “take it everywhere” camera. Launched in August 2007 it offers good quality 10mp images in a very small package.

However, when I did a search for some more information on it, what did I come across but that yesterday Pentax announced the launch of the S12 which is basically the same camera but with a 12mp sensor. Note that the launch has been announced but not actually happened (it’s due in March) so Pentax have delayed (and possibly lost) a sale to me.

After all, why buy the S10 now when I can get a much better camera in two months time for, probably, the same price? Sure, if I was just about to go on holiday I’d buy the S10 now, but I’m not so I’ll wait.

We’ve not mentioned the Toyota in a long, long time basically because it’s been sitting in the car park for the last couple of years after one of the brake pads stopped working and we just didn’t get around to having it fixed.

It’s not that it’s got a whole lot wrong with it, just that we never got around to sorting it out.

Anyway, although we’ve not been looking for one we may have found a buyer in the form of one of the chimney sweeps.

Well, we have an offer of cash or a swap for his van. I think we’ll be going for the cash somehow.

Over the last couple of years we’ve watched our very own French gite listings site slowly but surely climb the ranks in the search engines.

Now that it’s a middling size site, roughly comparable to the likes of VisitFrance in size it’s great to see that it’s sitting right there in the middle of all the fully commercial sites and, moreover, often towards the top of that list.

What’s confusing though is quite simply: why? After all, several of those commercial sites are spending quite serious amounts of money in promoting their site whilst we spend very little comparatively speaking. We know for a fact that at least one of the middle ranking sites (which we rank much better than) was spending around £3000 per year on marketing up to a year or so ago.

Confusing too is how come we’re not innundated with applications to list on our site in that we charge a maximum of £29 whilst comparable sites are charging around the £100 mark and, for that matter, we even offer a “free forever” listing too whereas others limit their free period to six months.

One thing that continues to amaze me is just how long some blog promotion efforts continue to run.

Almost a year ago, I started off on the Technorati Favourites Exchange and even now hardly a week goes by that I don’t get a little note to say that someone has added me to their favourites and can I reciprocate? You’d think that it would have petered out by now but it looks like one that could still be running in a few years time.

Others which you’d have thought should have been just as successful have indeed petered out or not really gotten going in the first place. I’d have thought that the mutual blog reviews movement would have really taken off but in reality it’s rare to see more than a handful on any blog that you see doing them.

Now what I need to do is to find the next Technorati Favourites Exchange and get in on it at the start.