There’s a rumor going around that Lindsay Lohan has bought a California timeshare. To make the story even more titillating, Lindsay Lohan’s purchase is described as a “rehab time share” in an online article by the entertainment industry spoof website Dateline Hollywood.

It is true that there are timeshare resorts to suit a wide variety of needs and interests. In the past, I have written about urban timeshare, timeshare houseboats, and even timeshares for nudists, but to the very best of my knowledge, there is currently no such thing as a rehab time share. This story is a scam—an industry spoof of the daily headlines.

The Lindsay Lohan timeshare story quoted her as saying, “I realized that I was pouring money down the drain by renting a room every time I go into rehab.” While Lindsay Lohan probably did not say that, or anything close to that, the theory behind the statement is dead-on. Any time your vacation, business, or personal travel takes you back to the same location, time after time, it is usually a wise move to buy timeshare or a timeshare resale. And if a California timeshare interests you, there are great deals available in timeshare resales and timeshare rentals.

Dateline Hollywood is all about making the entertainment industry even more entertaining with articles that parody the activities of news making celebrities like Lindsay Lohan. And when you think about it, it must be a challenge to come up with spoofs that are more outrageous than what some celebrities and so-called celebrities are actually doing that makes the headlines.

Here’s a great short interview with Lindsay Lohan, filmed in 1997, just after she made Disney’s The Parent Trap. The interview, about her experience during the filming is credited to Entertainment Tonight and ETOnline.

Mashable is a social networking blog and one I read as often as I can. The blog is written by Pete Cashmore, and I have a great deal of appreciation for his knowledge of internet marketing in this age of Web 2.0.

Last week, he ran a blog post called, Tech Startup USA: 27 Web Companies in the Northeast. He looked at some of the more notable web based companies, or the type of online based businesses that are sometimes referred to as a “dotcom”.

I won’t go into all the online companies that made the list, but here are a few, and Cashmore’s description of them, including names you will know and a few you may not:

• Del.icio.us – Popular social bookmarking site that centers around posting links and promoting and sharing them via tags.
• Xanga – Popular social networking community, currently ranked #92 on Alexa.
• Library Thing – Service lets you organize your book collection, find books and authors of interest, and connect with people based upon literary tastes.
• MyBlogLog – Simple social networking for bloggers, featuring a highly useful widget that tracks and displays blog visitors.
• FeedBurner – Leading RSS Feed service, FeedBurner creates and manages RSS feeds for site content and offers any array of related services—such as detailed statistics and reporting – at fee and paid subscription levels.

If you are interested, I hope you will go to the Mashable blog and read about all 27 companies. They really fascinated me, especially since these are online companies that have put down roots so close to where we, at Sell My Timeshare NOW, are here in Dover, NH. As Cashmore says, “…it’s sometimes easy to forget that web companies are real entities tethered to Earth-bound locales.”

Sell My Timeshare NOW is both a bricks and mortar business and an online global web company. Besides our Dover, NH office, we have an office in Altamonte Springs, (Orlando) Florida. And while clients, customers, and anyone who wants a very average cup of office coffee are always welcome to drop by, our business is primarily as an Internet based company or dotcom.

Sell My Timeshare NOW may not have made Mashable’s list this year, but we are seeing some pretty amazing growing. Our website traffic is up 53 percent over 2006, and the number of offers to rent or buy timeshare is up 55 percent for this same period. Across the board, we will exceed all performance predictions—in all categories—for 2007. And you can read more about our own personal success story by clicking on this Sell My Timeshare NOW press release.

I don’t brag as much as I should about the accomplishments of the great group of people with whom I work. On July 23, when Fosters Online carried a story about our fast-growing timeshare company, Sell My Timeshare NOW, I was reminded that readers of our Timeshare Owners Blog might also like to hear a little more about the efforts of this hard working team.

As you may have read here before, our company started in a very small way—the spare bedroom at my house. Over the last four years, we have grown tremendously. We are now one of the most visited timeshare resale and timeshare rental sites on the internet.

Sell My Timeshare NOW advertises and markets timeshares for sale or for rent by the people who currently own them. Every single day—every single minute—people from all over the world visit the Sell My Timeshare NOW website. They either want to sell or rent their timeshare or they are interested in taking advantage of the great opportunities in timeshare resales and rentals. Many of our website guests come to the site because they have realized that timesharing enables them to become vacation property owners without the individual hassles and expenses that go with sole property ownership.

We have an incredible staff at our company. They make our clients and customers feel welcome, wanted, and valued. They are not acting when they do this; they genuinely care about the people we serve. We have some amazing technology gurus on our staff, too. They are driven to make our online services the best and most effective in the industry.

And then, there are all those employees at our company who fill all the roles that hold us together, keep us humming along, and make working at Sell My Timeshare NOW easier, more productive, and truly pleasant.

To every one of you, I tip my hat. You are talented, hard working, and together, you have made this the fastest growing timeshare advertising and marketing company in the industry. Salude!

The sale and rental of new timeshares and of timeshare resales benefits the economy both directly and indirectly.

The American Resort Development Association, known as ARDA, recently released statistics on the economic effect of the timeshare industry in certain geographic regions. The study showed that the timeshare industry positively impacts regional, state and local economies in measurable ways. In fact, resale timeshares specifically are a significant and sometimes overlooked economic contributor within the industry.

The studies prepared for ARDA by PricewaterhouseCoopers and released by ARDA International Foundation, show that the Florida timeshare industry contributed $12.3 billion to that state’s economy in 2005, and the Nevada timeshare industry contributed $2.8 billion to the Nevada statewide economy during the same period. While many states in the US gain considerably from the presence of the timeshare industry, Nevada and Florida head the list, with California and South Carolina coming next in line.

Timeshares positively impact the economy through the sale of new and resale timeshares, job opportunities created by the industry, direct and indirect expenditures of timeshare vacationers, and revenues realized through local property taxes. Every time someone buys a timeshare resale, two positive things happen. First, a new owner takes possession of the timeshare unit, begins to use it, and feeds money back into the economy where it is located. But secondly, a person who no longer wants or needs that particular timeshare is relieved of the on-going cost of vacation property ownership and is freed-up to put his or her money into something else, including even new timeshares.