Strawberry, honey, truffles, you name it, they’ve got a festival for it!
April 17th, 2007 | 
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With start of April starts the onslaught of the festivals for just about every fruit, vegetable or drink you could name.The one problem with them is that you’ve really no idea in advance whether or not a given festival will be a popular one or just a few stalls trying to sell some obscure vegetable.
One of the best we’ve been to lately was the strawberry festival at Bellesta which is a village quite close to us but one we’d not been to before. They were lucky enough to hold the festival on a particularly sunny day following some of the last of the Winter rain. Combine that with the Vide Grenier (car boot sale or flea market) and the village was seriously struggling under the weight of traffic and people looking for parking spots on the day.
In fact, there were only two small stalls selling strawberries but the other stalls gave a very good representation of the local produce ranging from excellent honey as you can see, through the spicy sausages that you find everywhere here, and olives. Strangely, the wine makers didn’t have a big presence but then there are numerous wine festivals from now through to harvest time.
The majority of the festivals are only publicised locally so it’s potluck as to whether or not you’ll see the sign for one as you travel along the road. Larger villages are generally a better bet than small ones but really you can get a wonderful experience from even the tiniest village which is, of course, as happens in what we’d call church fetes.
Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.
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Trips and holidays: New England
It’s been a while since I’ve been on one of the grand-scale holidays that I used to go on quite regularly but the point is coming up when it’ll be time for another one so I’ve started looking round the places that I went to in the past.
Anyway, as part of the pre-trip plans, I’ve started tidying up and updating the outline guides that I used to run up for the big trips and they’ll be starting to appear on the trips section of this site in due course.
The first one is for New England which I spent about four weeks going round way back in mid-September 1996. That’s quite an unusual area for America in that it has quite a bit of history behind it and is quite compact too. So compact in fact that we ended up spending almost three weeks within 150 miles of Boston.
The unexpected highlight of the trip for me was Concord Massachusetts which is where the War of Independence started or, as we would refer to it, the rebellion. Whilst in the rest of America us brits feel very much at home, this is the place where our history books diverged. So, whilst they would say something like “American patriots killed two of the occupying British forces” we would say, using present day terms, “American terrorists murdered two British soldiers”. It’s a very peculiar place to be if you’re British as you feel very much as though you are intruding and shouldn’t be there.
As I say, it’s very historic and filled with a wide assortment of living history museums. You can experience life in the early 1700s in Plimouth Plantation, the 1800s in Old Sturbridge Village and into the 1900s in the mansions of Newport Rhode Island. It’s so compact that you could quite easily base yourself in Boston and see most of the sights as day trips.
Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.A wrist slapping from Technorati
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.
Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.The master of blog marketing
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.
Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.
Blogsite promotion
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.
Then there was the Technorati favourites exchange on Wednesday which is still rumbling on and which has left behind a fair amount of work that I’ve still to catch up on at some point.
Finally on Thursday, I aided and abetted with the 2kbloggers list which may tootle on for a while as fellow bloggers catch up with it on their own blogs. Or perhaps they won’t as it causes a fair amount of hassle for a day or so after you post the list.
Is all this worth doing though? It’s impossible to say at the moment and even in a months time it’ll probably be hard to give a definitive answer. Certainly, if I’m pulling in $100 a day on adsense at that point I’ll likely attribute that to this weeks efforts but more than likely it’ll only be $1 and I might have pulled that in anyway. At present, the only thing that it’s safe to say is that my blog has a much higher profile in the blogging community than it did a week ago but that doesn’t necessarily mean that I’ll get significantly increased blog traffic once the efforts of this week tail off in the course of the coming week or so. What will be useful is the much improved ranking on Technorati as that should make it easier to attract links from related sites and it’s those that I think will make this weeks work worthwhile.
So now that it’s Saturday, I’m back to the other side of the fence and looking for ways to make money out of the blog and gradually working through a raft of sites that I’ve picked up. Most notably amongst those is that at Blogged-Out which has an enormous quantity of information regarding site promotion and, more importantly, making money out of it. I’ve barely scratched the surface of it at the moment and expect to be pinching great great ideas from Darren for ages to come.
Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.
