On With The Motley

Over the last three years I have been writing about the difficulties I have had since making a big mistake and losing control of my websites and my business in 2005. The stress and worry of this put me out of action for months and it was not until spring last year I started to recover my health.

Nearly ten years of building a successful Internet business was wiped out and starting again is much more difficult. I was lucky to have been a pioneer in Internet community sites, blogging and classified advertising online, but today there are literally millions of competitors and getting into search engines, which at the moment still means getting into Google and this needs a lot of money.

To try to get back on my feet, for the last year I have been working with Coast and Country who are real-estate agents on the French Riviera. I have been adding services for them in Languedoc and selling some property. It is a funny business, in France estate agents are a protected species, registration is difficult and the methods of selling are medieval. I have discovered that I am absolutely useless at being a house salesman and I am not fit enough to develop old properties anymore, so I am donning my fools clothing and must concentrate on building what is left of my Internet business, leaving the French real-estate business to the cheats and liars I found lurking under the ancient stones of Pezenas.

I launched http://www.AllRentalsFrance.com last December and had hoped to have been able to get help developing this - it is something I know a lot about as I started one of the first French rentals sites over ten years ago.

I am also developing the structure of a new community site aimed at people looking for a fresh start in life, whether a new country, new job or new friends. The name I still like best is http://www.PortableSoup.com because Portable Soup was a food designed for survival and exploration, just like my community.

There are other information sites I am working on which I plan to develop to help people find and choose property to buy or rent. The idea is to develop some of the new intelligent technologies in searching and mapping to eliminate estate agents and booking agencies and thus pass on huge savings to the end user. It is going to happen in the next few years and I would like to be one of the first to offer this.

So, here I am, starting all over again