Chez Yankois: A Site for New England's French

I am very proud to announce the rebirth of Chez Yankois.

Chez Yankois was my original project to serve the Franco-American community of New England with an online presence. In its original inception, it was the blog where I first introduced the term Yankois to an audience larger than a room and, most importantly, provided me an excuse to follow and learn of the events and stories of New England Francos.

That project suffered the blessed problem of having more information to write about than I could handle. That fact couple with an existing corps of bloggers that could manage to cover it (Rhea Cote Robbins, et al, Bill Cork, and Jacques L'Heureux come to mind, I mothballed it and began almost a year experimentation with other possible ways to connect the Yankois community online.

The culmination of that was released on January 1 at www.chezyankois.com and it goes miles beyond a blog to be a full social network. No longer is it a broadcast medium, with me at one end and readers on the other. It is now a forum for complete participation by its members.

People can find one another through common friends. Groups can form around Franco interests or any interest in French. People can publish their own blogs! Events can now be shared, not as I post a blog update once a week, but as the organizer or any interested member adds it personally. Photos, videos and music can now all be shared easily on one Franco-American-centric site, instead of a mish-mash of groups across many general sites, making full aspects of our culture finally come into view in one place online.

I have very high hopes for this project, and the company I created to manage it, and I hope that anyone reading this will see it for themselves and help spread the word.

Merci!