Just a couple of years ago, legendary British comedian John Cleese said he was retiring from writing and performing, telling interviewers that he didn't think he could ever eclipse some of his earlier television hits such as Monty Python or the Fawlty Towers series. But stepping back from doing prime-time comedy doesn't mean that Cleese has retreated from his fans -- far from it, in fact. They can now get closer to him than ever, since he has jumped on the Web 2.0 bandwagon and is involved in a surprisingly large number of different “social media” networks and services.

The 68-year-old comedian doesn't just have one website. He has three of them: one called Cleeseblog.com, including an active public forum where fans can post comments, another that hosts his archived podcasts -- which he has been doing for over a year -- and a third site that hosts his archived video blogs (which cost $1 to download) called Headcast.

Cleese also has a mini-social network of his own hosted by the startup Ning, called The Cheese Shop. But that's not all. The Monty Python star is also on Twitter, a kind of group chat/instant messaging service, where he has 2,300 people following his comments. Among other things, Cleese has posted messages on Twitter about looking for a new place to live, now that he has divorced his third wife and sold his California ranch for a rumoured $16-million.

For those who don't want to follow Cleese in all of these different forums, the comedian has also helpfully set up an account on FriendFeed, a kind of social aggregator that allows users to see what their friends are doing or posting on a number of different social-networking services, including their blogs, Facebook, Twitter and the photo site Flickr.