Thanet Life, Simon Moores Moves the Goalposts, is it a new Thanet Blog Wars?

I have been commenting on Thanet Life blog since sometime in 2006, sending Simon information and pictures that he has published there since that time too, so I was pretty much gob smacked when I got an email from him today saying that he was refusing to publish a comment I had made there. This hasn’t happened before and I am not certain if I will ever be able to comment there again, or for that matter if I will even bother to try.

This relates to a key Thanet issue that Simon raised on his blog about consultation over the disposal Thanet’s council owned leases.

Here is what the said:

“DrM. said...
Andrew, the most fundamental change is the treatment of long leases of 25 years or more as part of the overall asset disposal process.

The emphasis is now very much on consultation as part of such a process to avoid circumstances where the council is seen to be over-riding the wishes of local people without proper consideration of their arguments. 1.37 pm.”

Now an important point here is when this change came into effect, because of some of the disposal issues that have come up recently in Thanet. There have been many contentious asset issues in Thanet, part of Hartsdown Park in Margate being the most recent.

Here in Ramsgate there are several large council owned assets in prominent positions and some of them have been effected by this rule, Pleasurama where the council granted a 200 year lease to the developer without any consultation, The Maritime Museum where the council invoked this rule in a way that caused the closure of the museum, the slipways where the council used this rule to prevent a developer obtaining a long lease to build a bar complex there.

This is essentially an issue about money, as developers need leases longer than 25 years to finance developments on council owned land, hence the council are able to effectively halt the Margate Football Club development, that has planning permission, by not offering the club a long lease. This can also effect grant funding for charitable organisations wishing to run council assets. There is also the common sense side of this, it you are going to run a museum or theatre, you are in for the long hall and can’t invest heavily when the building’s security is a matter of the council’s whim, even if you could I doubt the charity commissioner would let you.

Anyway here is the link to Simon’s blog post http://birchington.blogspot.com/2011/02/lost-in-translation.html and here is my comment that he refused to publish.

Michael Child has left a new comment on your post "Lost in Translation":

Thank you Simon for the information, did you mean 26th July 2010 or 2009?

This is a quote from an email I received from the council in February 2010.

“The position regarding the Clock-Tower Building, occupied by the Steam Trust is as follows. The subject was discussed by the Council’s Overview and Scrutiny (Asset Management Working Party) in view of the length of lease sought by the Trust.”

With relation to your pervious replies the difficulty here is that you are different from the other bloggers, in as much as you are privy to council information that we are not.

In an ideal world the council’s information department would have a forum where major local issues could be discussed openly on the internet, it is the perception from outside the council, is that the councils information department exists exclusively to control the information that is available to the public.

I suppose in a way even that would be mostly unnecessary if the council published all of the information it held, apart from the information that would be refused in a foi request, as the council receives it, onto its website.

This could be achieved with considerable savings in costs to the council, by the council insisting that all information sent to the council, was supplied in preferred file formats, with the council levying a charge to commercial organisations either sending information on paper – so it has top be scanned in – or in a file format that has to manual converted for web publication.

In this instance I would say that you are as much a victim as the rest of us, in as much as the changes to such a fundamental rule about the way the council conducts its business, should have been publicised and the rules governing the way the council rents out its properties should be clearly and openly available on the council’s website.

The discussion I had with the leader of the council isn’t pertinent to this issue as it relates to a lease of less than 25 years and not the older lease that council didn’t issue due to the new rules. However it demonstrates very clearly what I am saying about information that you are privy to and we are not, put the shoe on the other foot for a moment and consider the situation if I was privy to your conversations with the leader of the council and said to you. “Simon. I understand the Leader of the Council called you to personally explain the issues surrounding such and such an issue, and hopefully that should have answered most if not all of your questions.” By way of an answer to a question you had asked me on a blog

Comment posted 11.18 am 2nd March 2011-03-02

Don’t misunderstand me here I delete comments that are potentially libellous, offensive or containing personal abuse, I suppose all bloggers do, but to delete a comment because it disagrees with your point of view, well that is another matter altogether.

When a local councillor who claims to support transparency and impartiality does this, then one can only form ones own conclusions.

Pinch and a Punch it’s the First of the Month, popularity scores for the Thanet Blogs

A word of warning, if you thought the rest of this blog was a bit boring, this is the pits.
First the Google referral stats for this blog http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/311/ if this is all Geek to you, they show the people who arrived here by clicking on a link, on another website and may be an indicator of that site’s popularity.

Next the referral stats for my press release blog http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/311/id3.htm I have only put these up because they show my other blog in a very good light, it seems to have overtaken Eastcliff Richards.

This is all a bit like Adrian Mole and measuring ones thing, once it stops growing due to age one tends to measure other things, in this case statistics.

Next my act of audience piety, a screen shot of the visitor statistics for this blog during last month http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/311/id4.htm many thanks to the 4,186 individuals who read this blog during the last month.

Next a bit of a peculiar disparity, things as the say don’t quite add up, being a closet geek I use special statistics, this means I embed a wasisname in my websites and the lovely machine at google reads this and gives me all sorts of information about the site usage.

Here is the screenshot of the overall graph http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/311/id5.htm the less geeky have had access to this sort of information about their blogs since last July, when blogger added a statistic page to the bit where bloggers twiddle with their blogs and this gives a different set of figures and a different shaped chart see http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/311/id6.htm As you can see it’s a lot more optimistic and raises some questions like. What about the 128,752 visitors since July when the site meter that has been on the site since – oh well for ages – only registers 177,683. there is of course the possibility that loads of visitors have been sneaking in by some sort of backdoor and missing the site counter. Sadly though I suspect that my metaphorical thing is shorter than I thought.

There is a neck and neck race between Bignews Margate and Thanet Life, when I looked yesterday the flying doctor was in front but overnight the intrepid track layer has crept in front by four places, this battle between plane and train – what am I talking about here and was it only yesterday I metaphorically measured my thing?

I imagine most of the other blog writers will be far too self-confident to even look and see where that stand in this dubious scale.

Just one further thought and that is the time effort involved, with all of the different bits of web publishing and taking screen shots, these pinch and a punch, posts are some of the most time consuming ones that I do, this one took about an hour to put together.

An hour of my life, you see blogging is really for the insane, why do it? The answer is, I don’t really know.

Just thought if this web statistics thing interests you, I can’t unlock the password on my blogger statistics, probably because I am not geeky enough and can no longer unlock the http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/ as I have had had to switch its hosting to a Windows server, because of a problem with an Access based searchable online database, you didn’t really want to know that did you?

However I can completely unlock the statistics for another of my sites http://thanetonline.com/ so that all of the links work and you can see the amount of information available to webmasters http://www.thanetonline.com/stats/awstats.pl?month=02&year=2011&output=main&config=www.thanetonline.com

This is because of the wonder of linux that lets you fiddle with things that windows wouldn’t dream of.

Here for instance is the list of visiting ip addresses http://www.thanetonline.com/stats/awstats.pl?month=02&year=2011&config=www.thanetonline.com&output=allhosts this is the thing that identifies all of the visitors to the site, I am not a number, comes to mind.

Pinch and a Punch It’s the First of the Month

Once again Mr Borings monthly blog post, so unless you have a local blog I would give this one a miss.

Here is a list of the traffic to this blog from other local blogs and websites that comes here by clicking on a link on those websites.

Click on the link for it http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/2111/

Here are the top local blogs, with some notes.

Still at number 1 EASTCLIFF RICHARD http://eastcliffrichard.blogspot.com/ with 345 readers sent here from there Wikio, not rated.

Quite why this should be the case when he hasn’t posted anything since 21st September I don’t really know. Last seen on Facebook where he said. “Contrary to popular opinion, I am not dead. Merely resting.” On 12th October, and his final word even more recently on Twitter, where he said. “What chance of flogging a Fannit cliff top mansion in this economic climate? That said, my London pied-a-terre is up 30% in 5 years!” on 5th January.

Blog quick to open comment moderation set, test comment 11.14.

At number 2 BIGNEWS MARGATE http://bignewsmargate.blogspot.com/ with 195 readers sent here from there Wikio rating 919.

Tony being at number 2 seems reasonable as he posts regularly the content is controversial, interesting and he gets a fair amount of comment.

Blog is a bit slow to open due to advertising, irritating word recognition when you try to comment, and comment moderation set, belt and braces very difficult to comment on, test comment today 11.29.

At number 3 Thanet Life http://birchington.blogspot.com/ with 192 readers sent here from there Wikio rating 1630.

Good and informative local blog run by local councillor, always publishes my comments although some of them disagree with what he says and put him in a difficult position, well done that man.

Blog quick to open, irritating word recognition when you try to comment, and comment moderation set, belt and braces very difficult to comment on, test comment today 11.44.

At number 4 Eastcliff Matters http://eastclifframsgate.blogspot.com/ with 73 readers sent here from there Wikio not rated.

Good and informative local blog run by local councillor.

Quick to open no comment moderation or word verification, easy to comment on.

At number 5 Ramsgate Remembered http://my-ramsgate.blogspot.com/ with 70 Readers sent here from there Wikio not rated.

Quick to open, impossible to comment on.

This all links up with the same chap’s other local history site http://www.ramsgatehistory.com/ where you can comment so not really any black marks for not being able to comment on his blog.

Both sites are excellent for information about Ramsgate’s history, my only warning being is that if you go there you may not get much else done for a while.

At number 6 Promote Thanet http://promotethanet.blogspot.com/ with 49 readers sent here from there Wikio rating 4024.

Quick to open no comment moderation or word verification, easy to comment on.

This blog is an interesting mixture from a local disabled bloke, being the internet though you wouldn’t know, if he hadn’t said.

The latest innovation here is that Don has evidently acquired a camera that he can use despite his disability, so he is putting up some from the wheelchair shots that offer a different and interesting view.

At number 7 Thanet coast life http://thanetcoastlife.blogspot.com/ with 47 readers sent here from there Wikio rating 4385.

Quick to open no comment moderation or word recognition, test comment 1.42

This blog is an excellent resource for Margate history and local marine ecology, once again the only snag being, if you go there and start working back through the posts, you may not get much else done today.

I may do some more of this but it’s a bit time consuming.

New Thanet Blog INthanet

Ken Read or “Readit” if you follow the local blog commentators has started a new blog, see http://in2thanet.blogspot.com/

Thanet blogs and some Ramsgate pictures

Having just updated my little used blog Thanet Blogs http://thanetblogs.blogspot.com/
and considered the sanity of blogging, posting can become something of an addiction and I sometimes wonder if I post when I really haven’t got anything much to say.

At least this wasn’t the case over the last couple of days, I see the Gazette has published an article about the Pleasurama cliff façade repairs, I couldn’t find it on their website though.

They seem to be a lot more certain of their information than me, saying definitely that two more panels are bulging and going to be repaired.

Nothing about the maritime museum or the hijacking of the Little Ship Sundowner by TDC, as you see from today’s pictures both the steam tug Cervia and the maritime museum are adorned with flags for the Operation Dynamo commemorations so perhaps the situation there is better than I thought.

Anyway having deleted the dead blogs I had a trawl around for some new Thanet blogs, to replace the ones I had deleted, the criteria being that they must have local content and a reasonable amount of both posts and comments within the last month.

It would seem that local blogging is diminishing, if anyone has any ideas on this one please let me know.

A few thoughts on the pictures, first sorry the camera needs cleaning again, the pictures taken inside are of the Custom House where Ramsgate Town Council have taken up residence.

The Amco Express shop in Queen Street is to be a European supermarket, I am told it is owned by Poles, with the connivance store opening in the old Boots building last Mad Max’s in Harbour Street Ramsgate is getting rather a lot of food shops.

Here are the pictures http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/510b/id6.htm