Keep in touch when you are traveling

Most people I am in contact with in France are from other countries. They want to keep in touch with family and friends and I am fascinated the way Internet has evolved over the last ten years to make this easier.

I first used a cybercafe in 1996, it was in Lyon, a visionary friend had opened the first Internet cafe in the city and it was one of the first in France - I made my first website there and wrote my first line of html - pioneering days.

We rented our apartments using only the Internet and one of our first clients happened to be a team from O’Reilly the publishers of technical and training books for Internet applications - they kindly gave me many of their books and I am still referring to them today.

I was on dial-up modems and paid by the minute - my phone bill was over 1000 dollars a month in the early days and it took all night to upload a small website of a dozen or so pages.

Our guests would sit at my old Pentium 1 computer and send emails to families all over the world, no digital cameras, no videos, Hotmail was the leading edge technology (it was the only technology).

Today we completed the sale of a classic home in Pezenas to a client from New Zealand - they are planning to live here for a year (or more perhaps) - watch the world cup rugby matches, visit friends and explore France. They have been reading my newsletters for a long time and it is due only to the Internet that I have met them and they came to Pezenas. They asked my advice about the best way of keeping in touch with their friends and sending photos, should they start a blog about their trip etc.

Although I spend hours on Internet sites every day and have been researching Web2 sites before the name was invented, I did not have a clear answer to this - I immediatly said www.Facebook.com would be the best - it does have a good photo album service, but it does not really have it’s own blog, I use it mainly as a reference for all the interesting applications it is getting now, and for storing photos as I seem to use up the allocated space in www.flickr.com too fast and never get round to paying for more storage. Another option with more blogging services seems to be www.xanga.com.

These are social networking sites and your friends will really need to join them as well, although you can just cut and paste links to photo albums etc and send these by email. A better, simpler option may be www.pownce.com - this is, at present, by invitation only, but I have a bunch of invitations I can give so if you want to join please contact me - all these community sites are free.

However, the best way to keep in touch is to get your own blog - you do not need to buy your own domain or pay for hosting, all this can be done online and, in my opinion, it is a one horse race - WordPress. com is the best online blog service, or download from WordPress.org if you want to setup and host your own, very powerful blog both services from WordPress are free.

For simple file sharing and chatting Pownce seems to be the best, although Jaiku is very good and Twitter is a big player.

You will find me on all these social networks, join them all and add me as a “friend” I can then write to you directly through these channels or help you set them up.